Like Midnight
by Cartographical
Summary: The call about the body came from Lanie, at four in the morning, on her day off. Lanie never called her about bodies.
1. Chapter 1

**Author:** Cartographical

**Title:** Like Midnight

**Summary:** The call about the body came from Lanie, at four in the morning, on her day off. Lanie never called her about bodies.

**Notes: **This story is set in the third season sometime after 3XK. If you haven't seen that episode, you might have some moments of confusion. Also, please be aware that this is probably going to be a semi-lengthy story and that the drama llamas are going to run wild (or at the very least become semi-feral).

**Disclaimer:** Nothing Castle-related belongs to me. And to give credit where credit's due, "like midnight" is a couple words from Emily Dickinson's "It was not death, for I stood up."

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**ONE**

* * *

The call about the body came from Lanie, at four in the morning, on her day off.

"Hate to do it to you, but you want this one," Lanie said immediately.

"Why?" Beckett questioned, brusque, her pulse hammering insistently in her throat. The vibrating of the phone had startled her out of a dream that she couldn't quite remember, the images slipping and shifting away when she tried to grasp them. Something with blood, she thought, or maybe it was just red wine. Had Castle been there?

Lanie never called her about bodies.

"It's at Broome and Crosby." Lanie's voice was a little too professional.

"What?" Beckett breathed, suddenly struggling for oxygen, her throat tightening.

"It's okay," Lanie said. "It's not – it's not anyone you know. But it is in the alley across from his apartment. And you need to see it, now."

"I'm on my way." She had already rocketed out of bed, yanked off her tights, and begun pulling on jeans, phone propped between her chin and shoulder, the room still lit only by the florescent green glow of her alarm clock.

"Don't call Castle," Lanie said just before she hung up. Beckett froze for an instant, lost her balance, and hopped a couple times, jeans caught halfway up her thighs, to keep herself from crashing to the floor. "I don't want him to beat you here."

She ran the sirens on the way to the scene. The streets were clear in a way that only happened at 4:30am on a weekday, everyone finally home after last call and the early-morning workers just waking, and she took advantage, breezing through the lights, letting the car bounce and skitter over cracks and potholes.

She made the drive in less than half the usual time, trying all the while not to remember that she had a usual time to this particular crime scene. She pulled up next to ribbons of yellow tape and an already-growing cluster of detectives. When she looked up, across the street, she could see the dark expanse of Castle's ridiculously large living room windows.

* * *

Fifteen minutes later, she was tilted forward against Castle's door, having pressed his doorbell sharply six or seven times. She finally reached into her pocket, ready to admit defeat and pull out her phone (she's not sure why it was defeat, why she hadn't called instead of walking over in the first place, only that she'd had a sudden, overwhelming urge to see his face), when the door swung abruptly open and she stumbled forward a step.

Castle stood there, blinking muzzily, loosely clutching a neon-green water gun with both hands. A wrinkled grey shirt clung to his torso, black sweats slung low on his hips, and his hair stood up in five or six different directions.

"Beckett!" he said, managing to sound relatively chipper despite his disheveled appearance. "Come in! What brings you here this lovely morning? Breakfast?" He gestured into the house with the florescent firearm.

She stepped just inside the door. "I came to – I'm sorry, Castle, I can't take you seriously when you're holding that ridiculous toy."

He scoffed. "Ridiculous toy? This, Detective Beckett, is a Super Soaker XP90 Pulse Fire. This is a _classic_. You can't _buy_ this anymore." He paused, cocked his head. "Actually, you can. I bought it off ebay."

"Why?" Beckett asked, watching Castle carefully place the gun on a side table. A small pool of water immediately formed underneath it.

"Protection, obviously. It's the middle of the night and it sounded like there was a madman at my door. I promised Alexis I would be more careful."

That refocused her. "Look, Castle," she started, but she trailed off when he stepped closer to her, his eyes broadcasting concern as they flicked over her face.

"Are you okay? I didn't mean to be flippant just then."

She sighed. "Of course you did." _Enough_, she told herself. "There's a crime scene across the street. I need you to come with me and see it, but first you need to tell me where Martha and Alexis are."

He tensed, his body going too still, his jaw clenching. "They're here. Why?"

"And Gina?"

He hesitated for a moment, looking a little bewildered, a little angry, more than a little concerned. "She's here, too. Please tell me what's going on, Beckett."

She paused, then delivered the news with the same outward calm that she'd used with countless families (this wasn't so bad, she told herself - nobody Castle knew personally had died - but she still felt the same aching pull deep beneath her ribs). "The scene is – disturbing. And it concerns Alexis."

He opened his mouth, shut it, stared at the ceiling for a beat. "I will be right back," he said as he pivoted and walked steadily away with measured steps that were just a touch too quick.

Beckett snapped open her phone and dialed Montgomery. "Castle and Alexis are at his apartment. Martha and Gina, too, so there's no need to redirect anyone. I'll call you when I have more information." He said something meaningless back about her taking care of them (what else did he think she was going to do?) before hanging up the phone.

Standing in the middle of the living room, Beckett felt suddenly awkward, off-balance. She knew Castle's apartment well enough; if she were being honest, she'd admit that she felt more at home here than her cramped, dimly-lit sublet, but it was different when there was a crime scene across the street. (It was not different because she knew that Gina was there, sleeping in Castle's bed. That made no difference at all.)

"Let's go," Castle said, rushing into the living room in jeans, a jacket over his shirt. "I checked on everyone; they're all fine and sleeping soundly."

"Good, that's good," she murmured.

They stepped into the hallway to see four uniforms standing outside his door. She'd known they would be there; she'd called for them the second she'd gotten to the scene, but it was still disconcerting.

"Detective Beckett," a tall, muscular man said with a nod. It took her a minute to remember his name.

"Haines," she replied. "You have my number if you need anything."

"You have nothing to worry about," he said, turning slightly to include Castle in their conversation. "We take care of our people."

"Thanks," Beckett replied, as friendly of a goodbye as she could manage. She heard Castle murmur the same as she began moving deliberately down the hallway. She could feel his presence behind her, his unasked questions crowding her, breaking the natural rhythm of her walk. She stepped into the elevator, jabbed a button violently, spun to face him. "You and your family are going to be stuck with them for a while."

He blew out a breath, not bothering to hide his aggravation, and shifted from foot to foot.

She fought the urge to touch him. "Look, Castle," she said in a low, measured voice, still the kind of voice she used with victim's families. "I know you're frustrated. I do. But you've got to trust me, okay?"

He finally looked at her, eyes broadcasting exasperation and anxiety but, above all, sincerity. "Of course I trust you, Beckett."

The elevator stopped before she could respond, and they walked silently through the lobby and into the chill of the early morning air. They'd gotten up a couple more spotlights since Beckett had left, so the scene was bathed in a harsh, flat light. Ryan and Esposito had arrived; she could see them gesturing animatedly to Lanie on the outskirts of small a knot of uniforms.

Castle was already plowing toward the lights, so that she was the one who was trailing, nearly trotting to keep up with him. He stopped so suddenly that she almost crashed into his back, and she could tell, from the way his breath stopped halfway through an exhale, that he'd seen the victim.

"Shit," he said.

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A couple things... (1) Okay, so it's not a sequel to my last story, 'Fractured.' I will still potentially write that sometime, but this has been kicking around in my head for a while. (2) I'm going to try and update pretty regularly, since sometimes chapters will end in somewhat stressed-filled places, and I know all too well that sad, empty "WTF are you doing, you gigantic jerk?" cliffhanger feeling you get when there's no Next clicky button (or when you can't fast forward the DVR, etc. etc.). (3) Not to sound coercive or needy (even though I am definitely both), but reviews are like crack to me and I tend to write a wee bit faster when I get them. *nudge nudge*


	2. Chapter 2

He wasn't sure how long it had been since he'd gotten his first glimpse of the corpse, but he hadn't been able to drag his eyes off of it – off of her – since. He could feel Beckett watching him as he stooped, slowly, next to the body, but he couldn't look at her, couldn't look anywhere except the dead girl carefully positioned the middle of the alley.

She was young, fifteen, maybe sixteen, and her red hair was long, a mess of loose, vivid waves. She looked peaceful, the way she was placed on the ground, almost as though she was sleeping, save for the thin strangulation pattern around her neck. The vibrantly red diagonal lines were unmistakable. As was the girl's uncanny similarity to his daughter.

Beckett crouched next to him, her knee brushing against his, and he finally managed to drag his eyes off the dead girl.

"You, Martha, and Gina are all going to have people on you around the clock."

"And," he prompted, voice clipped.

"And we need to make a decision about Alexis. Obviously, we have uniforms watching her. She's your daughter, and it's your call, but I'd keep her home for a couple days, at least until we have a better handle on what's going on here."

"What's there to have a handle on?" He didn't bother to control the sharp edge of his tone. "We know who did this."

"We still need to get our vic to the –"

"You really think this isn't Jerry Tyson?"

"No, Castle, I'm almost sure it is. That's why I'm putting out more uniforms than I ever have to protect you and your family. But careless police work isn't going to help us, and jumping to conclusions is careless and you know that." Her voice was steady, resolved, and it helped ground him.

He rapidly flipped through scenarios and possibilities, trying to calculate how he could keep his daughter as safe as possible. "Should I send Alexis to California? She can stay out there with Meredith."

Beckett raised her hand and slowly pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and index finger. "I don't know, Castle. Unfortunately, we still don't have a clear picture of the extent of the resources available to Tyson or the scope of his connections, so we have no idea how far his reach could extend."

Castle stood abruptly and walked away from the corpse, stopping to face an alley wall. Seconds later, he heard Beckett's heels clicking closer, and, for the first time ever, he wished she wouldn't walk up to him.

Her footfalls stopped several paces from him. "Angela Branson," he heard Ryan say, and before he could stop himself he was turning to face Beckett, Ryan, and Esposito.

"Sixteen years old. Junior over at York Prep," Esposito added, holding up a student ID in his gloved hand.

Beckett glanced at her watch. "Alright, it's a little early, but let's see if we can get someone from there on the phone and get a number for her parents."

Castle had drifted over to their conversation until he was standing shoulder to shoulder with Ryan, staring at the girl's – at Angela's – ID.

"Will do," Ryan said, reaching over and giving Castle's shoulder a sharp, reassuring pat. He and Esposito both yanked out their phones and walked to the opposite side of the alley.

Beckett looked at him, eyes dark. "Maybe it's not a bad idea for Alexis to go to California. You and Martha and Gina can head there with her. I know a couple cops out there; we could get you a decent detail, and there's always private security."

"Seriously?" he asked, staring at her.

"Look, Castle, I know it's not ideal –"

"You think I'd just walk away from this? From her?" He gestured to the prone body, sprawled peacefully in the alley.

"It's not that –"

"You think I wouldn't be useful in solving this case?"

"Castle, will you please let me get a sentence out?" she snapped. He sucked in a breath, nodded. "It's not that I don't think you would be useful, but until we have a clearer idea of why this –" she motioned sharply at Angela – " happened, I want to keep you and your family as safe as possible."

"How much clearer an idea do you need?" Castle huffed.

"Why Angela Branson? Why not actually attack Alexis? He had to know we would drastically increase security on her, on all of you, the instant we saw this. Is he just playing mind games? Does he actually intend to escalate to a personal attack on your family? Why is this so important to him that he would switch his entire M.O. from strangling twenty-something blondes to strangling teenage redheads?"

Castle leaned back against the gritty cement wall as she spoke, took one deep breath, then another. The scene had disturbed and upset him, but he hadn't quite conceived that it really could have been Alexis lying there, that they had come close, far too close, to looking at his daughter's strangled body. Suddenly, he couldn't pull enough oxygen from the dark morning air.

Beckett's hand suddenly squeezed his forearm, once, then again, and she left it resting on his jacket as she shifted to place her body between him and the crime scene. She moved confidently into his space, stopping about six inches from him (he thought, fleetingly, that they had spent less time invading each other's personal bubbles lately). With anyone else, it would have made him claustrophobic, but instead it filled him with her presence, loosened the tightness in his chest, made it possible to breathe again.

"This case," she said in a low, measured voice, "this case is something you shouldn't have to go through."

"Maybe not," he said. "But I'm not running away, not to California, not when he's still out there."

She nodded and parted her lips, maybe to reassure him, maybe to try and convince him to go, but Ryan and Esposito were swiftly approaching. Beckett pulled back into her own space abruptly. "Parents only live ten blocks from here," Ryan said, tapping his notepad against his hand.

Beckett nodded. "Ryan, Esposito, finish up here. I'll go talk to them." She blinked, held her eyes closed for a millisecond too long, and when she opened them there was the same deep, exhausted look she had each time she was about to inform someone of a loved one's death. Despite the situation, he felt the same impulse he always did, the need to reach out a finger and rest it against her arm, her wrist, her waist, but just like he always did, he suppressed it, offering up the only thing she would let him in the form of a small, comforting nod of his head.

She turned back to him, whispered, "I'm not going to tell you that you can't come with me. But I think you should go back upstairs and see your family. You can meet me at the precinct later."

He suddenly realized the extent of how shaken he was, how, since he'd been leaning against the wall, his legs had been trembling slightly, how his chest still felt too tight.

"You'll call me if you find anything," he said, not sure why he felt the need to confirm.

"Of course. Stay safe," she murmured, and he suddenly had to fight the urge to drag her with him back to his apartment, because he couldn't get back to his daughter fast enough but it was almost impossible to break away from Beckett's pull.

He finally managed, walking briskly with only a quick bob of his head as a goodbye, and soon he was rushing across the street, then tapping his feet impatiently in the elevator.

"Mr. Castle." One of the cops nodded at him and moved aside from the front of his door, and it was unbalancing and comforting, all at once, to know how closely they were being guarded. Lifting his chin in a silent greeting, he walked into the loft. He trotted over to his bedroom; he even got as far as placing his hand on his doorknob, but he wasn't sure why he bothered. Instead of stepping into the room and pulling off his jeans and crawling back into bed with Gina, he turned and trotted purposefully toward his daughter's room.

He was only going to crack the door, just to peer in and check on her. She was sleeping soundly, sprawled in her bed, but that wasn't the comfort it should have been, not with the image of Angela Branson's lifeless body looking so peaceful still blazoned in his mind.

He walked over to the bed and curled up next to her, facing her back, ignoring her indignant woof of air.

"Aren't you a little old for snuggling after nightmares?" she mumbled.

"You are absolutely never too old for snuggle time, especially when it's with your incredibly cool dad," he whispered.

"Was that an axe-murderer ringing our doorbell earlier?" she asked, still not wholly awake.

"Just Beckett," he replied, and then wished he hadn't as she flipped over and stared at him with suddenly-awake, worried eyes.

"Is everything okay? Is she here?" she asked.

"Everything's going to be fine. I'll tell you about it in the morning, pumpkin," Castle said unconvincingly, patting her arm.

She wrinkled her nose at him, calling him out on his obfuscating, but she didn't speak and, slowly, her eyes drifted shut. He had thought he'd be up for the rest of the night, but as he watched his daughter's rhythmic, steady breathing, he drifted toward sleep.

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So, I can safely say (with absolutely no bias at all) that you guys are the best reviewers in the entire world. Thank you all for making me feel oh-so-very loved, even though I was all spastic and mean with how I ended that first chapter (I will not tell you that it will never happen again, because I love you too much to lie to you, oh wonderful reviewers).


	3. Chapter 3

Beckett looked over the sixteen cops, clustered in loose groups near Esposito and Ryan's desks, all restlessly examining the murder board. (Far earlier that morning, she'd pulled out the whiteboard dedicated to Tyson from a narrow space in a storage closet, where it had been propped against a wall for the previous two months. Since it had been dragged back there, every week she would step back into the dark, constricted space and stare at the strangled women's faces. Despite the APBs, the patrols, the constant scans for similar strangulations, they'd had nothing new to add since Tyson had left Castle tied to a cheap motel chair.)

"This is going to be quick," she said, leaning slightly against her desk, her back to the murder board. Montgomery had turned things over to her, deferring to her intimate knowledge of the case (she was once again the lead, had never stopped being the lead, since no one had dared suggest that they let the case go cold again), and she usually ran quick and informal briefings. This particular meeting would be as short as possible. She, Ryan, and Esposito would bear the brunt of the case work for the immediate future, but Montgomery had wanted the whole division to be on top of the situation, and she'd agreed. It made her skin crawl - the last set of briefings on Tyson's activity had been too short a time ago, and she wasn't used to failing, not on anything, definitely not on anything this important. "You wouldn't be here if you weren't up to date on Tyson, and knowing how news travels around here, most of you have probably heard about our latest murder, which we now know happened between 1 and 2:30am this morning." While she spoke confidently when she gave everyone the bullets, she couldn't stop this lingering shadow of failure, the omnipresent, suffocating knowledge that she had allowed Tyson to kill again. (And it was worse, so much worse, because she knew that, this time, Castle was feeling the same thing.)

She gestured to the board, where a picture of the latest victim had been hastily tacked front and center. "Angela Branson, sixteen year old female, York Prep junior, found at 3:30am."

Beckett paused for a beat as she saw Castle walk out of the elevator. Haines and Garabaldi, his two shadows, followed him out but then hung back, both standing near the entrance to the bullpen. She allowed herself to clench her jaw for an instant – she much rather would have spoken to Castle privately, after the briefing, but there was no helping it. He smiled wanly at her as he walked up next to Ryan and Esposito.

"Lanie Parish confirmed an hour ago that the killer was almost certainly Tyson. There were no prints, but the strangulation pattern and rope fibers were identical. The only difference was some pre-mortem bruising around the wrists and ankles – she was tied up before she was murdered."

Even from across the room, she saw Castle deflate a little, and she could imagine him picturing Angela's last moments alive, full of terror, and thinking of Alexis in that same position.

"She was killed at the site where she was found, in an alley at the intersection of Broome and Crosby, which is directly across the street from the home of our resident writer." All eyes briefly turned to Castle. "Angela Branson is similar in age and physical appearance to Castle's daughter, so until further notice we're keeping sets of eyes on her, on his mother Martha Rodgers, on his partner Gina Cowell, and, obviously, on Castle himself. Given the situation in which we last saw Tyson, it's almost a guarantee that he's fixated in some way on Castle, so until further notice we're treating all of his family as potential victims."

Simmons shot up a hand and asked, leering, "Shouldn't _you_ have protection, Detective Beckett?"

She fought the urge to bristle – most of the cops in the 12th had genuinely come to accept Castle as one of their own, but the older man's ribbing about her and Castle's relationship always had an edge to it that raised her hackles. "We're focusing on immediate family, Simmons, but if you're real concerned about people in danger you can be the third set of eyes outside Castle's apartment," she said, icily. He took the rebuke in stride, remaining quiet for the remainder of the briefing.

She wrapped up quickly, fielding a couple questions about canvassing logistics and reiterating the importance of keeping all ears open for anything that could relate to Tyson.

Castle beelined over to her as soon as the cops scattered back to their desks. "How're you doing?" she asked by way of greeting, accepting a mug of coffee that he'd somehow produced in the fifteen seconds she hadn't been watching him.

He shrugged. "Alexis doesn't much like it, but she's going to stay in the loft for at least today. She has a friend bringing over assignments later so she won't fall too far behind on her schoolwork. I brought up a trip to California with her and Martha and Gina, but they all flat-out refused."

"I thought they might."

"How were the parents?" he asked, his voice a little too flat.

Beckett hunched inward a couple of millimeters. "Upset," she replied, a vast understatement. She had informed too many parents of deaths, enough that she was used to the standard pattern of one person growing hysterical and one person remaining more stoic. This time, both had lost control, the mother becoming frenzied, the father becoming almost catatonic. It had only gotten worse when she'd mentioned the possible involvement of a serial killer, and she'd wound up sitting with them, perched on a too-expensive armchair, for over an hour, getting absolutely no questions answered, until the family therapist (called by the father in one of his more lucid moments before the potential of a serial killer had come up) showed up at the door and she'd finally been able to leave.

Castle just shook his head, undoubtedly imagining himself in their place, and Beckett felt a fresh wave of frustration crash over her. "Castle," she began, but then her phone rang and she looked away and jerked the receiver up to her ear.

"Beckett," she snapped, feeling vicious.

"Detective Beckett, this is Eric Jenkins with the 21st Precinct. I'm calling about a body we discovered earlier this week, a young woman named Marisa Harrington."

His voice was young, tentative, and the worry in it set Beckett even more on edge. She took a deep breath before responding. "How can I help you, Officer Jenkins?"

There was another, longer pause. "My C.O. – he's not sure this is really a productive use of our time, and I'm not even a part of the senior team that's working the homicide…" Jenkins trailed off.

"Just give me the facts, and I'll decide what is and isn't productive." She felt Castle's eyes on her, but when she glanced up at him, he was staring at the phone with a burning intensity.

"The APB you re-released this morning. We don't have anything on the guy – on Tyson – but the strangulation pattern, it looks identical. Our ME says the rope was a quarter inch, twisted, green and white nylon."

Beckett sucked in a breath. "When was she killed?"

"Two days ago."

"I'll be there within the hour," Beckett said, already starting to gather papers from the desk.

"The thing is…" Jenkins trailed off. Becket drummed her pen against her thigh. "We got a suspect almost immediately. Her boyfriend. And it's, I mean, we have him dead to rights. He basically _confessed_."

"So why'd you call?"

"It's just – I'm sorry, I'm usually more coherent. I know I've been on the job for all of a couple months, but it just doesn't seem right."

"I'll see you within an hour. Let me worry about your C.O."

Jenkins paused a beat, and she couldn't tell whether he was concerned or relieved about her imminent arrival when finally said, "I'll be waiting."

She hung up and immediately walked over to the Captain's office, Castle trailing behind. She briefed Montgomery quickly and watched his body tense. He'd been in an awful state all day.

"How is it possible that this guy killed another woman, another woman in New York City, another woman in New York City _two days ago, _and we didn't know about it?" he growled after she'd summarized what Jenkins had told her.

"I don't know, Sir, and that's why I'm heading over to the 21st. I want Ryan and Esposito to keep digging into Angela Branson's afternoon – we still don't know how he found her or how he got her to that alley, and there's got to be a witness out there somewhere. If we can pull Kennedy and Jones full-time for the day, they can start crosschecking any of Tyson's possible connections to Angela Branson and our potential other vic."

He squinted at her for a beat, and she spent a fervent second hoping that she hadn't overstepped – she loved Montgomery as a Captain because he let her do what she had to to solve a case, but she rarely had to ask for more manpower than was easily available, and everyone had been working heavy loads lately.

"Anything else?" was all he asked in the end. She shook her head sharply. "Alright then," he said, and turned his attention back to the file he'd been holding.

She walked back to her desk, grabbed her jacket, and spun to face Castle. "Road trip?" she asked. She wasn't sure why it sounded so wrong, but, when she thought about it, she couldn't remember the last time she'd asked instead of ordered Castle go to with her. Somewhere along the way she'd started thinking of him like a partner on the force; she'd started to forget that all of it was optional for him.

He hesitated, and she wondered if perhaps she should have told instead of asked, if breaking the pattern wasn't making it worse, or if maybe she shouldn't have asked at all, if she should have just sent him home to his family, to Alexis and Martha and Gina. "Or maybe you should get back home," she added softly.

Castle shook his head. "No, I'll come. If I need to get back I can grab a cab."

Beckett rolled her eyes. "If you need to get back, you can catch a ride with Haines and Garabaldi."

He glanced toward the elevator, where the two cops were still standing with their arms loosely clasped behind their backs. "But I'll be with you," he whined. "You have a gun and some seriously kickass skills. Bad enough that they forced me ride with them on the way over here."

"You don't like Haines and Garabaldi?" Beckett asked, cocking an eyebrow.

"I don't think they're entertained by me," Castle said. "They don't even talk. They're like angry, boring robots, always scanning the horizon."

Beckett smiled a little at him. "As happy that I am at the faith you place in me, you're stuck with your shadows for now. I'll have them take their own car in case you want to get back, though." She didn't mention that separate cars were less efficient. She didn't mention that, if they really wanted Haines and Garabaldi close, they all should have ridden together. She absolutely didn't mention that, while his safety was the most important thing, she wanted him to feel less like a prisoner in his own life. (And she didn't mention that she wanted some time alone with him, that she missed him, that she was lonely, because she didn't want him and she didn't miss him and she wasn't lonely, simple as that.)

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Well, I finished this a little earlier than expected, due to a recent tryptophan-and-review-fueled bout of writing. I love reading your comments, suggestions, theories, and encouragement - thanks guys!


	4. Chapter 4

Beckett closed the distance between her right thumb and index finger, pressed as hard as she could, counted to five, and slowly exhaled.

"I'm sorry, Detective Peters," she said, carefully regulating her tone. "I think we may have gotten off on the wrong foot."

The heavyset man raked his eyes over her yet again, and yet again, she couldn't tell whether he was assessing her or mentally undressing her. The slight sneer on his face was making her press her teeth together so firmly that her jaw was spasming. "Look here, Miss Beckett," he started in what had to be an intentionally patronizing voice.

"_Detective_ Beckett," she growled.

"I'm sorry, of course," he said with a condescending smile. "As I was saying, I'd love to help you out, but I'm afraid Officer Jenkins just got a little ahead of himself. Surely you can't be running around investigating every murder in New York City. You understand, of course, issues of jurisdiction."

Beckett glanced to the side of her, where Castle was standing, but he remained steadfastly silent. It was worse than not having him there. When Peters had first stumbled his way into their conversation with Jenkins (they'd barely made it past introductions before the older officer had huffed into the room), she'd smiled her "Who is this guy?" smile that she reserved just for these special situations with Castle, but he'd been busy looking vacantly out the window. She'd spent the rest of the conversation half waiting for him to diffuse the tension with a witty comment, or, barring that, at least be subtly snarky toward the older man, but he'd remained hushed.

He'd been slightly more engaged on the ride over, responding to her comments, even theorizing with her on Tyson's whereabouts since they'd last seen him, but he'd lacked all of his usual energy. She'd tried to tease an actual conversation out of him by reminiscing about the time in college when, due to a complicated series of events, she'd had to pick up her boyfriend's younger brother from the 21st Precinct's baby bookings and they'd wound up pushing her motorcycle, which had just popped a tire, home in a monsoon at 2am. He'd smiled and laughed and looked at her a little fondly, but he didn't prod, didn't ask follow up questions, didn't watch her like he was trying to memorize the ebb and flow of her soul (she didn't want to admit that he hadn't looked at her like that in a while, not much since he came back from the Hamptons, even less since he'd first met goddamn Josh).

Beckett took her frustration and channeled it into an appropriately threatening voice. "Detective Peters, we are looking at a man who's murdered nine women, three of them on my watch. If Ms. Harrington wasn't killed by our guy then we'll back off, but I need to confirm that, and until I do, you better believe that I will go as high up as I need to go to make sure that I have _every bit_ of information I need to catch our killer." She had stepped into Peters' space as she spoke, and even though he was taller than her, he shifted back slightly onto his heels.

"Well," he drawled, "I suppose it won't hurt for you to take a look at what we have."

She chanced a muted glance of victory at Castle, but he was staring gloomily at the wall. "Thank you," she said. "I'd like to see the body and speak to your pathologist."

Peters called for Jenkins, snapping at the younger officer to bring them to the morgue. Jenkins scuttled along in front of them, Castle and Beckett following, Haines and Garabaldi trailing behind them. The two tails were good at their job; they were silent, unobtrusive, hanging back against the wall even in the face of Peters' gigantic egotism, and every time Beckett looked at them, even in the middle of the police station, they were quietly alert.

"Give me the rundown on the vic," Beckett told Jenkins as they walked toward the morgue. She found him easier to interact with in person; he seemed like a younger, more tentative version of Ryan.

"Marisa Harrington, twenty-two, senior over at Barnard College. 5'7, 120 pounds, blue eyes, blonde hair. Murdered in her dorm room on the campus at approximately 3am two nights ago."

Next to her, Castle huffed in frustration, and she turned half toward him and gave a little nod of agreement. That time frame put Marisa's Harrington's TOD less than twenty-four hours before Angela Branson's, which gave Tyson (if this killer was really Tyson) less than a day to change his fixation from murdering young, pretty blondes to playing mind games with Castle. It made no sense.

Jenkins continued, oblivious. "She'd been at a celebration of the swim team's win at sectionals, in Room 111 at Reid Hall, until approximately 2:45am. She was still in the dress she'd been wearing when she was found, laid out like she was asleep in bed." Beckett lifted an eyebrow at Castle. "Our main suspect is Brandon Green, a senior at Columbia University." He sighed, ran a hand through his crew cut. "On paper, he looks good for it. He had a recently-tumultuous relationship with the deceased – friends heard loud arguments almost every other day for the past couple of weeks. Same friends report that his behavior's been increasingly volatile over the past couple of months, correlating with his increased use of crystal meth."

"But," Beckett prompted.

Jenkins sighed. "There are too many conflicting reports about when he left Room 111. He was at the same party as the vic. Lots of the attendees barely remember the night, but there's enough of them that think he left after three that it's more probable than not. And…" he paused again. "I watched the interrogation of the guy. The cops told him he went on a bender and strangled his girlfriend, and he kind of believes it. But he just –"

"Doesn't seem the type," Beckett supplied.

Jenkins just shrugged. "What do I know?" he asked.

She made a snap call. "I want to see everything, but I don't want to look at Green. Not yet."

They ghosted through the station, Beckett and her shadow and his shadows, and they spoke to the M.E. and they pored over files and they confirmed that the rope that had killed Harrington was three strand, twisted, quarter inch, green and white nylon, that she was laid out as if she was sleeping, that the strangulation patterns were identical to the ones that Tyson's victims displayed. The knowledge pressed in on and around her, making it harder for her to breathe, and she couldn't guess what it was doing to Castle because he'd been closed up, shut off, and she'd thought maybe, after all these years, she could tease information out of him or make him smile like he could with her, but she couldn't, not when it mattered.

Hours after they got there, Castle and Beckett stood together in the middle of the 21st's bullpen. "It was Tyson," Castle said.

"Yeah," Beckett breathed, and she started to take a step toward him, but then Peters was stalking toward them with a less-than-welcoming expression.

"That's a nice theory," Peters said when she'd presented her evidence to him, "but you haven't even looked at the guy who's actually done it."

"You canvassed thirty-three attendees of the party, thirteen of whom can't remember when Green left at all, eight of whom have a fuzzy recollection of his leaving before or around three, and twelve of whom are certain he walked out after 3:15, which is definitively out of your kill window."

"Look here, young lady," he growled.

Beckett cut him off, deciding that life was too short Montgomery would have to sort out the mess. "I'm done here. I have the copies of your files, and I'll be stopping by the Barnard scene on my way back to the 12th. My team will go through it more thoroughly and speak to the partygoers and potential witnesses over the next couple of days."

"We have our man," Peters snapped, and Beckett bristled. She could feel Castle shift uncomfortably behind her – he knew how she felt about willfully obstinate cops.

_Index to forefinger, deep breath, count to five, _Beckett told herself. "Thank you, Detective Peters," she said icily as she pivoted on her heel.

She waited until she was out of the building to yank out her phone and dial Montgomery. "I'm on the other line with an extremely irate Detective Peters, and it sounds like you're lucky the Mayor's a fan," Montgomery said, without so much as a hello.

"Oh come _on_," she said before she could remind herself that she was speaking to her boss.

"Look, Beckett, I know this is personal, but you can't go around getting into pissing contests with other precincts."

"Sir, it was Tyson; I'll put my badge on it. I'm going to see the site where she was murdered right now, but I don't need to to know that Peters is wrong."

There was a long silence on the other end of the line. They reached her car, and she stopped and leaned against the hood, turning to regard Castle. He wore the same hazy look, not outwardly worried or upset, just – far away. Haines and Garabaldi stayed close, a constant reminder, not that she needed one, of how far from normal the stakes were in this case.

Montgomery relented. "Okay. I have your back on this, but remember that you're walking a fine line."

"Thank you, Sir."

On the drive to Barnard, Castle stared passively out the passenger window. She watched him out of the corner of an eye for a moment before dialing Esposito and giving him the bullets on their afternoon. "Have Kennedy and Jones help out with Angela Branson; I need you and Ryan to focus on Marisa Harrington for a while. I'll give you all the file copies when I get back to the precinct; you'll be heavy on the canvassing."

"I heard the contact at the 21st is an ass," Esposito said. Beckett sometimes forgot how ridiculously quickly word traveled, just like she forgot how much, on days like today, she appreciated Esposito's forthrightness.

"Yeah, avoid Peters at all cost. Talk to Jenkins if you need an in; he's a kid but he's okay, and Kramer is the M.D.; he's fine."

"Got it." Esposito paused. "You and your writer doing okay, Beckett?"

"We're pushing through. Thanks, Esposito," she said as she hung up.

Fifteen minutes later, she was standing in a cramped dorm room, Haines and Garabaldi at the door, Castle at her shoulder. The only indication that something in the room was wrong was a tipped lamp, a crimson bedspread crumpled on the floor, and, of course, the yellow crime tape stretched across the door. The room was scattered with pictures of the pretty blonde girl and her family, her friends, her boyfriend. "They found her where she was killed, lying on her bed," Beckett murmured to Castle. Any other time, she'd have trusted that he would have picked up the information during their conversations at the 21st, but this day, with him so quiet, so distracted, she wouldn't trust anything.

"So he was… waiting for her?" Castle queried. "Followed her in? Why didn't anyone hear anything? I mean – it's a dorm room, Beckett, the walls aren't exactly soundproofed."

She blinked slowly. "I'll get Ryan and Esposito to ask about any repairmen or deliverymen here on Saturday night – maybe someone dressed as facilities management."

"He could have even posed as a student," Castle suggested. Beckett fought the surge of frustration sizzling through her muscles.

"I just… I don't see it." She stalked slowly around the room. "Why murder Marisa in her dorm room and then change his entire M.O., the one he's stuck to for at least four years, and strangle Angela outside your apartment _one_ _day_ later?"

She'd meant for the question to be rhetorical, but as soon as she asked, she realized she was waiting for Castle to spin some outlandish theory, or, even better, to tell her how he would write Tyson's story, tell her how he would explain the serial killer's recent behavior. She'd never say it out loud, but Castle had a natural gift for profiling that, despite her years of experience and training, she would never quite be able to match.

But Castle stayed quiet, as he had all day, and in the end they walked out of the building with no clearer picture of Marisa's death than they'd had when they entered. As they stepped outside, the sun was sinking, lighting up the ribbed, gothic arches of a building across the quad. College students, bundled in coats and hats, were hurrying across the grass. Beckett inhaled deeply and let the cold air sting her lungs, watching Castle as he stopped three paces ahead, looking toward a glowing crenellation in the distance.

"I don't usually think of the sunset as bleak," he said. He hadn't turned to face her.

_It will all be okay_, she wanted to say, or, _We'll find him_, or, _I'll take care of you_, but she wasn't quite sure how to begin. "C'mon, Castle," was all she could finally manage, placing the flat of her palm on the back of his jacket and firmly guiding him to her car, "I'll buy you a coffee on your way home."


	5. Chapter 5

Castle blew out a breath and once again joined Beckett in staring at the whiteboard. It wasn't as full as it should have been. The two days since they'd first been to Barnard had passed in a whirlwind of thick files, of monotonous phone calls, of endless canvassing. They should have had had enough on Tyson's activities to cover a wall of the precinct, but the blank spaces on the board remained stubbornly present.

Tyson was an enigma; despite their best efforts, they had no idea where he might be, so they'd focused on the timelines of his two latest victims in the hopes that, somewhere within, they'd discover more about Tyson. Marisa's timeline was fleshed out and remarkable only in its relative ordinariness:

_7am-6pm, Saturday – Swimming competition _(Castle's mentally filled in what wasn't written – she'd competed in the Women's D-1 Northeast Swimming Sectionals, hosted by Columbia. She'd swum the 200 meter butterfly and the 200 meter individual medley.)

_6:30pm-10pm, Saturday –Team dinner, movie _(She'd eaten pasta with the rest of the team at her coach's house before watching _Up_ with some friends in a dorm room.)

_10:15pm, Saturday –Sleep_ (Her friend Jean Hartley had walked her to room on her way to her own adjoining room.)

_7am-6pm, Sunday – Swimming competition _(The second day of sectionals. She swam the 100 meter butterfly and the 400 individual medley. She'd come in third in the butterfly.)

_6:30-8pm, Sunday – Team dinner _(She'd eaten dinner with some friends from the team at a local diner before heading back to Jean's dorm room to prep for the party.)

_9pm-2:45pm, Sunday – Party _(The celebration of the swim team's win at sectionals. She'd had around six or seven drinks, according to Lanie, enough to render her drunk but not incoherent, according to her teammates.)

_2:45am, Monday morning – Walked to dorm room _(She'd left the party at Room 111, Reid Hall, and walked two floors up to her dorm room.)

_2:45-3:15am, Monday morning – TOD _(Strangled to death in her own bed in her own dorm room.)

_3:30am – Body found _(By her friend Jean, having stopped by on her way to her room to make sure Marisa wasn't too drunk.)

Nobody had reported Marisa's having any unusual contact with anyone. There hadn't been any delivery or repairmen in the dorm. Maybe Tyson had spotted her at the swim meet, or walking across campus. Tyson had no connection to Marisa. Marisa had no connection to Castle.

Angela's timeline for the day of her death offered even less insight:

_8am-3pm, Monday – School _(Angela had had a seemingly normal day at York Prep.)

_3:30pm-5pm, Monday – Coffee _(She'd gotten a drink at a local shop with three of her close friends before separating from them at the corner of Columbus and 73rd.)

_5:30pm, Monday – Text to parents_ (The message had been, simply, _Eating Dinner at Liz's. Don't wait up. _The friend, Liz Hawthorne, denied that any such plans had been made. They had no idea whether it was Angela or Tyson who had sent the text, or, if it was Tyson, why he would have sent it or how he would have known that she was friends with someone named Liz.)

_~5pm-5:30 – Potentially abducted near intersection of Columbus and 76th_ (Two extremely unreliable witnesses, homeless men who were in a nearby alley and who may or may not have been intoxicated at the time, saw someone who might have met Angela's description being helped – shoved? - into a light-colored van.)

_1-2:30am, Tuesday morning – TOD _(Strangled to death, in an alley, across from his apartment.)

Castle was frustrated by the lack of information on Marisa's timeline, but it was Angela's timeline that he couldn't stop staring at, Angela's timeline that stayed etched onto his retinas every time he closed his eyes. It was Angela's timeline that haunted him when he was asleep and awake, Angela's timeline that made him snap at Ryan and Esposito and Beckett, Angela's timeline that consumed every ounce of him in the bullpen and that had driven him home early the previous two nights, home in time to cook dinner (and when was the last time _that _had happened when they'd had a case?) because he couldn't be in the precinct seeing her now-dead face stare out at him from the too-blank whiteboard.

It was Angela's timeline that was gradually driving him insane, that and waiting for the other shoe to drop. Tyson had killed Marisa, less than twenty-four hours later he'd killed Angela, and now, more than sixty hours after that, nothing else had happened. Castle was antsy, itchy with the knowledge that Tyson was out there and after God only knew, and to top it off, Alexis had called half an hour ago and let him know, in no uncertain terms, that she simply could not remain jailed in the loft for another day. "It's driving me crazy, Dad," she'd said. "I have guards - the cops and the extra Securemedy guys you hired just for me. How long are you planning on keeping me locked in here? Weeks? Months?" And what could he do but agree, because it was Alexis, because she was right, because, much as he would like to, he couldn't keep her locked away forever.

But it made his bad mood even worse, made him even edgier, and as he stood, staring at the murder board with Beckett, he was suddenly overwhelmed by the crushing desire to leave the precinct, to get away from the pictures of beautiful strangled girls and from the haunting white spaces of the murder board. Beckett's tired eyes, staring at him with something that was deeper than understanding, that was almost pity, was too much. "I'll leave you to it," he said abruptly, a little too loudly, making her jump slightly. "Good luck." He just caught her flinch out of the corner of his eye, and as he walked away and stepped onto the elevator, flanked by Haines and Garabaldi, he told himself, again and again, that he didn't really care.

He was just stepping off the elevator, texting Alexis to let her know she was coming home, when he felt himself lifted by his lapels and shoved roughly against the wall.

_Where the hell are my shadows? _was his first thought, until he looked into the face of his attacker and recognized, with relief, the angry countenance of Esposito.

"Whoa, whoa, noncombatant," Castle said, holding up his hands.

Esposito let go of his jacket, but he stayed less than a foot away from Castle's face. "I might not be," he growled at the writer.

Castle left his hands in the same pose and stayed quiet, waiting for his friend to speak.

"If you're gonna be so goddamn useless, you can just stay home, because this isn't working for me anymore," Esposito snarled.

"Are you serious? Christ, Esposito, what?" He'd never seen the cop this angry before.

"I know it's your family that's threatened, and I know you're worried, but how can you not see it? Do you honestly think she's been home for longer than a quick change of clothes since we first found that body in the alley? How much sleep do you think she's gotten? How stressed does she seem to you? You've left the past two days and for the next hour she looks like she's been _flattened_."

"It's not –"

"Do you think she doesn't care about you?" Esposito railed, clearly on a roll. "Do you think she doesn't care that Alexis has been threatened? She's acting like she did years ago, but it's even worse now, because she won't let any of the rest of us help enough when you're here, but you're _useless._"

Castle blinked, feeling a little shocked, and then, gradually, a little righteously indignant, because yes, he'd been distant, self-absorbed, even rude, but hadn't it been at least a little justified? "Oh, come on, Esposito. You're acting like she's not self-sufficient. You're acting like she's _single_," he said, flinching when Esposito's fist clenched. Honest to God, he had no idea how he'd explain a black eye to his family, or to Beckett, for that matter.

"She and Josh broke up last week," Esposito snapped.

Castle paused, shifted, tried to wrap his mind around this information. "She didn't seem –" he started, but even as he said it he knew it wasn't really true. She _had_ seemed different, more subdued, more remote, even before they'd known about Tyson's return. He remembered almost mentioning it once as he'd handed her her usual morning coffee, but then he hadn't been sure how to start, so he'd just let it go.

"She did," Esposito interrupted, "And you'd have seen it, if you'd been paying any attention – hell, Ryan had her pegged after five seconds in the break room."

Castle raised his hands and scrubbed at his eyes, and Esposito finally backed away a step. "I have to –" Castle began.

"Don't you dare," Esposito said, his voice softening. "You do a 180 and walk back up there all kinds of sorry and it will end with her kicking both our asses. You think she wants your apologies right now?"

"Yes?" Castle guessed.

"Look, Castle, she doesn't need you to say sorry, and she doesn't need you to stay 'till god only knows when at the precinct, and she sure as hell doesn't need you to take care of her. She doesn't need very much. There's only one thing that you absolutely must do."

Castle bobbed his head.

"Stop. Being. An. Ass," Esposito said as he clapped Castle on the shoulder, turned, and walked back up the stairs.

Haines and Garabaldi watched him with bemusement from their positions just outside the elevator.

"Aren't you supposed to protect me?" Castle asked them.

Haines blinked. "We were."

"From your own awful choices," Garabaldi added.

On the way to Haines and Garabaldi's car, Castle pulled out his cell and tapped out a message to Gina - _We need to talk_.

* * *

When he walked into the loft, leaving Haines and Garabaldi with Kennilworth, the officer who shared permanent door-duty with Lapinski, Gina was sitting perched on a bulging Louis Vuitton suitcase in the middle of the living room.

"Oh," Castle said.

Gina smiled a little. "Sorry, Rick, was that talk you texted about going to be another marriage proposal?"

"This is not the result of an imprecise text," Castle said, vaguely gesturing to the packed luggage.

"Please," Gina huffed. "Things like this – a serial killer who may or may not be stalking your family, who may or may not be trying to kill you – aren't they supposed to bring you closer together?"

Castle thought about the previous few days, about how he'd been hideously distant not just with Beckett and the others at the precinct, but with Gina, too. "I'm happy to say I don't really have a lot of experience with that. I'd think it would depend."

"Has it brought you closer to Beckett?" Gina asked.

"You're not usually the jealous type," he evaded.

"I see."

He paused for several seconds, then opted for the truth. "No, it hasn't. It turns out I'm not my normal happy, useful self when someone starts threatening my daughter."

Gina sighed. "It's not just about that, anyway, Rick. I mean Beckett. Or our serial killer."

Castle regarded her coolly. Her cheeks were a little flushed, and her voice was maybe half a note too high, tuning a little sharp where usually she was perfectly in key. "No," he agreed, "it's not."

Gina flicked her eyes over him before amending her last words. "Well, it's not about the serial killer, anyway."

Castle floundered.

"I mean, honestly, Rick."

He knew, with a stone-cold certainty, that couldn't talk to Gina about _that_; he couldn't even wrap his mind around the entity that was his and Beckett's relationship, let alone vocalize it. "Where're you going? Will you be safe?"

Gina chuffed. "Black Pawn conveniently offered to send me to do some press in Vancouver. I'll be bringing two of the Securemedy guards, just, you know, to keep from getting strangled."

"I'll pick up their tab."

"I'll always think you're sweet, Rick," Gina said, dragging her suitcase up to him and placing a chaste kiss on his cheek. "You deserve to be in a relationship with someone you're actually in love with."

She walked out of the room, luggage in tow. Castle felt a vague sense of loss wash over him, along with a stunned disbelief at how quickly it had happened, but somewhere, deep in his chest, he felt like he could breathe a little more freely.

Alexis walked down the stairs maybe ten seconds later with laden arms, and Castle realized Gina must have already had a chat with her, probably after his ever-astute daughter noticed her waiting for him with a suitcase. "Okay," Alexis said, matter of fact. "I have guitar hero, laser tag, _Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human_, chocolate-mousse-flavored reindeer peeps, pretzel M&M's, and that Monster energy drink you say is so delicious even though I think it will make your heart suddenly stop. Oh, and I have the SuperSoaker and the marshmallow gun, which could either be the most epic battle ever or the most unfair."

Castle smiled fondly at her. "Nobody could ever doubt that you are my spawn."

Alexis tilted her head as she dropped her armful of goodies onto the floor beside the couch. "I don't know whether to be happy or disturbed that I could just find all these things lying around the house."

"Why would you ever want to leave?" Castle replied.

She reached over and punched him lightly on the shoulder. "Not talking about that tonight." She scooped a random armful of her cache off the floor. "Now, what do you say we drink some Monster while eating reindeer peeps and attempting the first ever SuperSoaker verses marshmallow gun battle?"

He ruffled her hair. "How could I resist?"

* * *

X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X

Thank you, loyal reviewers! You really do make my day, especially when I am all crazy busy at work sitting in another pointless meeting and I illicitly read reviews on my iPhone and then I am that insane person in a meeting smiling at nothing, which is infinitely better (for me, probably not for anyone else) than having that whole glazed-over drone thing going on.


	6. Chapter 6

At three in the morning, Castle finally gave up on the idea of rest. Esposito's voice kept echoing in his head - _How can you not see it?_ – and it overlaid the memory of Beckett flinching as he walked away. His sleep for the previous two nights had been full of dead redheaded girls, but at least he _had _slept, and there was no chance of that now.

He sighed, got up, and slid into jeans and a button-down and a coat.

"Don't you sleep?" he asked as he opened the door to see Haines and Garabaldi standing in the hall with Alexis and Martha's night-shift cops.

"No," Haines said.

"Sleep is for the weak," Garabaldi added with absolutely no inflection.

"It's three in the morning," Castle commented helpfully. He'd hoped and assumed that Lakowitz and Johnson, his night-shift detail, would have been there – they were a bit more pliable than Haines and Garabaldi, who he really had no chance of escaping.

"Three eleven," Haines corrected.

"Oh," Castle said, and started walking nonchalantly down the hall. Haines and Garabaldi immediately fell into step behind him.

"You know," Castle said casually as he continued to walk, "you don't have to –"

"No, we do." Garabaldi interrupted.

"It's our job," Haines added.

"It's just," Castle stuttered, "It just might be a bit of a private conversa…" He trailed off as he glanced back and saw Garabaldi's look of thinly-veiled disgust.

"By all means, then. We didn't understand. We'll be waiting here," Haines said.

"You're mocking me," Castle said, affronted. "I didn't know you knew _how_ to mock."

"We don't," Garabaldi replied, never breaking his stride.

Castle conceded his defeat. "To the cruiser?" he sighed.

"To the cruiser," Haines replied.

* * *

It was almost four by the time they pulled up to the precinct, and Castle was in a terrible mood. He had gone to Beckett's sublet first and knocked on the door for longer than was probably necessary, and even though Haines and Garabaldi had hung tactfully back by the elevator and had never said a word, it was embarrassing. To top off the experience, he'd never been to her sublet before, and he hated it – the foyer was too dark, the hallways too cramped, and couldn't there have been an indication of some security that was more high-tech than a peeling ADT sticker? And then, when he was tired and cranky and embarrassed and worried, he'd had to tell Haines to drive to the precinct, which had only added time to the already-exhausting late-night venture.

Stepping out of the elevator, he felt the inner quietness wash over him that almost always came when he walked into the precinct. He was used to late nights in this building, to the quiet darkness that curled around the bullpen when half the lights were off, to the background hum of the central heat that always evaporated in the early-morning din. His quick glance at the murder board, at the dead women's faces, caused the same diffuse ache in his chest as always, but he sucked in a lungful of air and ignored it. Beckett's jacket was slung over her empty chair. After a quick scan, Castle padded toward the break room.

The door was open, and Beckett mustn't have heard him enter, a sign of just how exhausted she was. She was leaning against the wall near the coffee machine, one hand covering her eyes, her shoulders more slumped then she ever allowed them to be with others present. He didn't need to see her face to know how tired, how defeated she was, and he wondered how he could have blinded himself to this. _How can you not see it? _Esposito's voice echoed yet again.

She must have felt him staring at her or heard his soft intake of air, because she dropped her hand and jumped slightly, her hand moving toward the gun at her hip. "Jesus, Castle," she rasped, voice low from fatigue, "What are you doing here? Are you okay? Is everything alright?"

Before he could think better of it, he was standing in front of her, closer than he had in days or weeks or months. Her body tensed at his invasion of her space, and he thought she might have bolted had she not already been against the wall.

"What the hell, Castle?"

He shifted closer. She pressed herself further back against the wall in response.

"Really, why aren't you home with your family?" she persisted.

He was as close as he could get without touching her and it still wasn't close enough, so he reached out and brushed back a shock of hair back that was falling in front of her cheek, ducked his head to catch her gaze when she glanced at the floor.

"I'm sorry," he rumbled.

She finally looked him in the eyes. "Are you going through some weird kind of PTSD right now?"

"I broke up with Gina," he said, inching his face a little closer to hers, ignoring her question.

She blinked once, tilted her head, her eyes searching his. "I'm sorry, Castle," she finally said.

"Don't be. It was for the best."

"Okay," she replied. She shifted slightly sideways, looking like she was preparing for an escape attempt.

Castle raised his left arm as casually as he could manage, pressing his palm against the wall just to the left of her. With her right side against the console table, she was boxed in, and he could see her eyes narrow as she undoubtedly calculated the most efficient way to body slam him and be out of the room in half a second if she deemed it necessary.

He feigned insouciance. "Was it for the best that you and Josh broke up?"

Her eyes narrowed another millimeter, and the set of her jaw became more pronounced. "Esposito told you," she calculated, always the proficient detective.

"Why didn't —" Castle began.

"He shouldn't have told you."

"He shouldn't have had to," he replied softly, feeling his shoulders sag despite his best effort to be resolute.

She turned her head to the side, her eyes a little too bright. "What do you want me to say, Castle?"

He considered her. "I broke up with Gina because I realized that our relationship wasn't really fair to either of us." Half a grin tugged at his lips. "Or, well, I would have. She beat me to the punch."

She shifted back towards him ever so slightly. The bow of her lower lip was tantalizingly close to him. "Oh."

"Why'd you and Josh break up?"

She didn't say anything, just silently stared at him, eyes dark and fathomless.

"Right," Castle said, rocking back to ease a sudden band of tightness around his ribs, giving her some space. "Not my business."

"No," she replied. "It is."

He thought she'd go on but she didn't, just left it at that and regarded him. As her words finally permeated his brain he realized, what more of a reply could he possibly need?

_I'm sorry_, his mind supplied, _I'm so sorry I've been an ass for these past three days, and I'm sorry I was an ass before that, too, and I'm sorry that before that I left for the summer, and that somewhere along the way I lost sight of what mattered, I lost sight of _you_, and maybe I can start to make it up to you?_ But his throat constricted around the words, so all he could do was push out small puffs of air and stare at Beckett staring at him until the only possible action was to lean in closer and closer and closer until his lips were just barely brushing against hers.

"We shouldn't," she sighed against his mouth, sounding not very much like she minded at all, and every double-time hammer of his heart responded _we should we should we should_.

"And here," he murmured, moving a hand down to rest against her side, moving his other hand over to brush along her neck, "is a secret they never will share."

She smiled, muscles loosening under his hands, her mouth a whisper away from his. "Only a novelist would think to convince a cop to kiss him in the middle of a precinct by quoting _poetry_."

"You want a murder mysteries instead? Derrick Storm is immensely quotable."

A whisper of a laugh trembled through her. He could feel it on his lips. "Narcissist," she murmured.

"Are you a sonnet girl, Beckett? Are you my truant Muse?"

She leaned forward and ever so gently bit his lower lip before drawing back. "You're getting colder."

"Yes is a world," he said, skirting his hand over her ribs, trying not to let his voice crack or waver, "and in this world of yes live skillfully curled all worlds."

"Well, then, yes," she breathed, and almost before she'd finished he was kissing her, his lips pressing firmly into hers.

He didn't fully realize how screwed he was until after he was tasting the inside of her mouth and his hand had worked its way under her button-down to the soft skin just over her ribs and she was leaning against the wall with her back arched toward him. All of that, maybe he could have handled (no, he couldn't, she was turning him inside out; he was melting into a quivering gelatinous pile of lust), but then she made a deep, low moan in the back of her throat, and the sound reverberated into his mouth, and he finally completely comprehended just how lost he was, how he could probably keep kissing her for the rest of his life but how he wasn't sure that he would ever be able to _not _kiss her again.

When they broke apart, they stood silently with their bodies pressed together and their chests heaving. As their breathing finally slowed, Beckett yawned tremblingly against his cheek.

Castle ran a hand through her hair. "You, my dear Detective Beckett, need sleep."

"I'll go home and take a nap in a little bit," she murmured into his ear.

"Oh, no no no," he said, trailing a finger along her jaw. "Driving exhausted is at least as dangerous as driving drunk. _Mythbusters _said."

She brushed her lips against his cheek. "Well, my car is here."

"How about me and my Robocops give you a ride home, and then tomorrow morning we can pick you up on the way back here at, say, ten?" His palm smoothed over the curve of her neck.

"Tricky, Castle. Make it six and you might have a deal." She ran her fingers along his spine.

"Nine?" he bartered, shifting his head and pressing a kiss into her forehead.

"Seven or I take a nap on the break room couch and call it a day," she breathed, sweeping her lips across the bridge of his nose.

"Beckett," he growled, finally stilling his treacherous body. "You can't keep going like this."

"I can," she said firmly, echoing his stillness. "Seven or it's a no go."

He sighed, then nodded and reluctantly untangled himself from her. Haines and Garabaldi were standing at their usual posts near the elevator, and, for the first time, Castle felt a profoundly grateful rush that they were his shadows, because there were no knowing smirks, no assessing stares, just the same alert, watchful gazes.

"We're giving Beckett a ride home," Castle informed them with forced casualness.

"Good," Garabaldi said.

"Driving tired can be dangerous," Haines added.

"Hey, _Mythbusters_, right?" Castle said, and, feeling generous, held up a fist for Haines to bump.

Haines stared. Castle lowered his fist. Beckett rolled her eyes. Castle fought the urge to kiss her.

They rode in the back of Haines and Garabaldi's squad car like teenage miscreants. Castle kept reaching over and catching her pinky finger in his right hand, and she kept pulling it away but then leaving it close enough for him to try again. He tried making sad, pleading eyes at her and scooting a little closer, but she jerked her head at Haines and Garabaldi in the front of the car and mouthed 'Hell, no' at him.

"Can I walk you upstairs?" he asked when they pulled up in front of her sublet.

"You'll see me again in a couple hours, Castle."

"Eight, right?"

"Funny. You're not waiting patiently in my hallway at seven, I'm subwaying it."

Castle weighed his options and surrendered yet again. "You win. I'll be the one yawning pitifully in your doorway."

"You're welcome to sleep in before you come to the precinct. You don't need to be there with me so early."

"No," he said, aware that Haines and Garabaldi were sitting there, aware that if he didn't choose his words very carefully, Beckett could and would easily disembowel him later. "I do need to be there with you." He paused, watched her face, silently asked her to understand him. "I want to be there with you."

She gave him a look that made him want to lunge across the seat and jump her, but before he could move she quirked a smile at him, slid out of the car, and shut the door. He watched her walk away through the window, her shoulders drooped in exhaustion but a swing, almost a saunter, in her step.

* * *

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So, like many Americans, for me Christmas is very exciting and is the light at the end of my stupid December tunnel, but then I get to work when it's dark out and leave when it's dark out and, like, yuck, right, and how could I ever possibly survive? But then I get your reviews which I promise I still illicitly read when I should be listening to Very Important People tell me exactly what to do (which is extra fun because then I don't know what to do and I get to make it all up!) and it just brightens my day, like every review is a small troupe of happy singing Christmas elves. I think the only downside is that sometimes these sneaky reviews get me excited to write more and then I stay up late writing and then my sleep-deprived self starts coming up with figurative language comparing reviews to troupes of elves.


	7. Chapter 7

By the time his daughter walked into the kitchen at six fifteen, Castle had already had a productive morning.

"You're whistling," Alexis informed him, blinking, "you're whistling and you're making waffles."

"Good Lord," Martha said, stepping through the front door on her way in from what was clearly a long night out, wearing a red dress with a sequined fringe that clacked whenever she moved. "What is that noise?"

"You did something," Alexis said, disregarding her grandmother and studying him intently as he thrust a plate of waffles in front of her. She was always a little too quick for her own good. "You did something with _Beckett._"

Castle threw his hands up in the air. "You get that from waffles and whistling?"

"Beckett?" Martha questioned.

"Gina and dad broke up last night," Alexis informed her, still studiously watching her father. "And now dad is whistling while making waffles. Waffle whistling. It's suspicious."

"Oh, my," Martha cooed, "That is suspicious." She walked to the counter, sat on a stool, rested her chin in her hands, and stared at her son. "So? Spill it."

"Why would you assume I did anything with anyone, let alone Beckett?"

"Oh, please," Alexis answered. "What else would you waffle whistle for?"

"Maybe I'm happy I'm a bachelor again!" Castle responded, a defense which even he had to admit was somewhat flimsy.

"Well," Martha said, "_are_ you a bachelor again?"

He hesitated, his eyes darting between the two women, a crispy, golden waffle dangling from the tongs.

"Aha!" Alexis trumpeted, victorious. "I _knew _it."

Castle turned back to his waffle iron. "Oh, would that I lived with a father and a son," he muttered grumpily.

"So, talk," Martha said, smiling brightly. "Does Alexis have a new stepmother?"

He spun to face them, gesturing vehemently with the now-waffleless tongs. "If I ever hear either of you say the word _stepmother_ in front of Beckett –"

"Death, mayhem, destruction, we get it," Alexis said. "I promise not to slip up and call her mommy."

"We're not," Castle began, then restarted. "We haven't talked about… It's not like we've had a conversation…"

"Oh God," Martha interrupted. "One teenage girl is really all that is necessary in a single household, even if one of those girls is as mature and brilliant as my granddaughter."

"Thank you, Mother." He turned toward Alexis, who blinked at him innocently as she chewed her last bite of food. "And you," he pointed accusingly at his daughter, "shouldn't you defend me?"

Alexis smiled as she brought her plate to the dishwasher. "Someday you're going to have to stand up for yourself. Speaking of, I'm off to school!" She twirled in a little circle as she said it.

Castle immediately grew more serious, feeling a fluttering panic beat against his chest. "So I've been thinking," he started.

"Dad, no," Alexis immediately responded. "You _swore_."

"Would one more day really –"

"_Yes_. I'm going to school."

"I just think that –"

"Are you really going to do this?" Alexis asked, angling her chin up at him and looking, it felt, straight into his soul.

Castle huffed a little. "You're coming straight home."

"I promise."

He stared down at the now-heaping serving plate of waffles a little guiltily. "Also…"

"I know _that _look," Martha said.

"I got you two more Securemedy guards."

"Dad," Alexis groaned. "That's _six_ of them if you count the two from the NYPD and the two I have already. There's not even going to be room for them in some of my classes!"

"I cleared it with the principal already," he defended.

"Don't you think it's a little excessive?" Alexis asked, glaring.

"No. You want to go to school, I'm letting you go to school. You may accept my conditions or you may stay here in the Fortress of Happiness."

"To school with six bodyguards it is, then," Alexis sighed, grabbing her backpack and heading towards the door.

"Isn't it a little early?" he asked.

"Nope. I scheduled appointments before school with all my teachers to make sure I understand _everything_ I missed during my imprisonment."

Castle walked over and squeezed her in a tight hug. "Please, please, please be careful," he said.

She tilted her head up and kissed him on the cheek. "I promise, Dad."

* * *

By the time they arrived at Beckett's, Castle was reasonably certain that Haines and Garabaldi were ready to save themselves the trouble of being his bodyguards by strangling him themselves. They didn't tip their hands in any human way (not like Beckett, whose shoulders tensed or whose eyes narrowed or who sometimes breathed out a tiny, sharp puff of air), but their looks had become more and more steely the longer they'd driven. Castle was sure that it had to do with his inability to stop shifting around and questioning them about the certainty of Alexis' safety, but honestly, were six seemingly-competent guards actually enough to stop a killer who was really, really determined? (An unequivocal _yes _was Haines and Garabaldi's final answer.)

Rapping on Beckett's door, he decided to be more grateful that his shadows' harshest response thus far had been a stony silence. Five seconds passed, then ten, and he waited and thought back to the night before and tried not to wriggle around in the hallway like an overexcited teen. He knocked again, a little more sharply. No answer. He glanced down at his watch – 6:55. Another thirty or so seconds, another knock, and finally he called out, "Beckett?" Was that a muffled thump, maybe her getting out of bed, tripping over her couch, coming to the door? No – still no answer.

"Hey, it's Castle. You better not have gone to the precinct without me, Beckett – it's not even seven yet!"

Another minute passed and all was silent. He knew how exhausted she was, knew she was probably just dead to the world in bed, but ever since that one night when he couldn't reach her and she almost died in an explosion, her being out of contact made his hair stand straight on end. He pulled out his phone and scrolled to her name, but with his finger poised above the call button, a text from her came through - _Couldn't sleep. Went back to the precinct. See you here?_

"Beckett," he growled, frustration making his jaw clench and his muscles twitch. He would force her to sleep today, he swore to himself. _Funny_, he texted back, _I was literally just about to call you. Or break down your door. Later we can nap together on the break room couch. I'm on my way._

Haines and Garabaldi must have been thanking whatever deity they believed in, because he was quiet and unmoving on the way to the precinct. His chest kept tightening with a sharp sense of worry – three days since anyone had been killed, and Alexis now getting ready to go to first period at school, and Beckett working herself into an exhausted frenzy, and them no closer to finding Tyson, and all his thoughts swirling in a jumbled mess in his head until, finally, they arrived at the 12th.

He didn't feel right stepping into the bullpen. The vague disquiet that he'd felt at Beckett's sublet and that had magnified in the car ride had continued to get worse instead of better, until he physically felt it, a hard, angry knot in the middle of his torso, a knot that made his stomach spasm when he looked towards Beckett's desk.

Her chair was empty. Her jacket wasn't there. Her computer was off. _Stop it, _he told his heart, which had started stuttering against his sternum. He scanned the bullpen, walked to the break room, looked inside, turned around, scanned the bullpen again. There were only a handful of cops there, Esposito and Ryan among them, all hunched over their desks, all absorbed in whatever had drawn them to the building before seven thirty.

He walked back over to her desk, rifled through a drawer, tried to understand where she could be. He moved in a circle around the bullpen, peering down hallways, pacing back to her desk. He'd been there, what, three minutes? Five minutes?

"Hey," he said, trying to get Ryan and Esposito's attention, but the word came out in a strangled whisper from his too-tight throat.

"Hey," he tried again, a little louder, but Esposito was on the phone and Ryan was bent over a stack of papers and neither one responded.

"Hey," he tried once more, and it was only when every head in the bullpen whipped around to stare at him that he realized he'd shouted it. Ryan and Esposito looked hugely annoyed. He didn't care.

"Where's Beckett?"

* * *

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I know, I know, this was not exactly the nicest way to end a chapter. But oh pretty please don't take away my singing elf reviews - it is so cold and rainy here and they make my life ever so very bright and happy.


	8. Chapter 8

_Where's Beckett where's Beckett where's Beckett? _The silent mantra pulsed in his head and through his veins. He wanted to scream it, to shout it until everyone in the bullpen understood his urgency.

"Did you try her phone?" Ryan asked, looking at Castle like he was some sort of moron.

"She texted." Castle yanked out his phone and scrolled to his inbox. "She texted at 6:55 this morning to say she couldn't sleep and she was at the precinct."

Esposito was on his feet and standing next to Castle before he'd finished his sentence. "Call her. Now. I've been here since six thirty and I haven't seen her."

Castle pulled up her number and jammed his finger into the send button so violently that the phone skittered out of his hand and onto Beckett's desk. "You've reached Katherine Beckett," her voice immediately echoed out of the speaker.

"Why didn't it ring? Why wouldn't it have rung?" Castle asked Ryan, who walked over, reached down, and ended the call.

"Castle, I'm going to need you to take a deep breath," Ryan said, clapping him on the shoulder reassuringly.

Castle grabbed the phone off the desk and called again, pressing the receiver to his ear and pacing frantically.

"Still straight to voicemail," he announced, a little too loudly.

"Can you calm down, please? Maybe she went to get a bagel and her phone ran out of battery. She was still here when I left last night at eight," Ryan said, and Castle realized that they were several steps behind him.

"I, um, I came to the precinct last night. Early this morning. I, well, we, we dropped her off at home, I don't know, a few hours ago." He couldn't work his thoughts into a straight line, couldn't think over the irrationally loud pounding of his pulse.

He could see their moods change, could see the exact second, right as he finished talking, that they shifted from a desire to interrogate him over his and Beckett's latest relationship gossip to a genuine concern for her safety.

"When and where did you last see her?" Esposito asked.

"Walking into her apartment, at, I don't know when, early."

"Approximately five thirteen," Garabaldi said, walking towards them with Haines. Garabaldi had never insinuated himself into a conversation before. Castle couldn't have been more grateful. "She'd confirmed that we'd pick her up again at seven, but there was no answer at her door at 6:55 am, which was when Castle received the text and we came here."

Esposito called out across the bullpen, "Who opened up here today?" Kennedy lifted a finger in the air. He and Jones had been coordinating with the 21st to pin down anything from Marissa Harrington's murder that could be put to use in finding Tyson, and they, like everyone on the case, had been putting in intense hours. "What time did you get here?"

"Five forty-five."

"You see Beckett?"

"No. Our section was closed up." Kennedy's forehead scrunched with worry, and when Castle scanned the bullpen, he could see the rest of the cops watching them concernedly. Nobody liked to think another cop was in trouble, and Beckett was especially well-liked.

"Everything okay?" Jones asked, scrutinizing them.

"It's fine," Esposito said. "We're taking a quick road trip." He turned to Castle and lowered his voice. "We'll go to her apartment. You follow us with Haines and Garabaldi, and keep trying to call her. I'm sure it's all just a misunderstanding," he continued, his clipped tone belying his words. He immediately walked toward the elevator, moving twice as fast as usual, Ryan almost trotting behind him. "Run sirens," he said to Haines and Garabaldi as they left the bullpen.

Castle spent the ride to Beckett's with the phone pressed against his ear, continuously calling, hanging up, and calling again, the sirens echoing in his ears. He only spoke once, after what his phone informed him was his twenty-seventh outgoing call. "Where is she?" he'd asked, his voice tight with worry. Haines and Garabaldi had looked at each other but remained silent. Castle had pressed the phone back to his ear and hadn't spoken for the rest of the ride.

They pulled up to her sublet just behind Ryan and Esposito, and the five of them jogged up the stairs to her apartment. Ryan rapped on the door, then rapped again, called, "NYPD! Open up!" There was no answer.

Ryan stepped back to kick in the door, but Esposito put a hand on his arm, snapped a glove on, moved forward, turned the knob. The door creaked open.

Castle closed his eyes and thought back to the night before in the break room, to the moment after his lips had met Beckett's, to the softness of her mouth beneath his, to the small moan that had rumbled in the back of her throat.

Esposito and Ryan had already walked into the apartment. "Fucking fuck," he could hear Ryan (Ryan, of all people) say. He didn't want to follow them. He wanted to turn around and walk back to his apartment; no, he wanted to walk back to the night before, back to when he was pressed against her in the break room, and he wanted them both to never, ever move from there.

But then Haines said, "Come on," his voice a little softer, a little tighter than usual, and Castle found his feet and propelled himself into her apartment.

His eyes couldn't find one place to rest, couldn't find one thing to stop on that horrified him the most. Her coffee table was shattered, the glass top of it scattered in tiny shards from one wall to the other. Her television was lying on the floor, an armchair was tipped, a cushion of her couch was torn and cotton batting had tumbled all over the floor. His chest felt weighted, pressured, almost like when he was a teenager and had gone out in surf that was a little too big and had sucked in huge lungfuls of water after getting knocked off his board. Esposito called from an adjoining room – "Castle, Ryan, in here, now" – and he forced himself to inhale, to move.

Her bedroom was a disaster. The covers were lying in a rumpled heap on the floor; the side table was flipped; pieces of her lamp and her alarm clock littered the carpet. Castle stopped, stared, feeling almost outside himself, dazed by the total destruction of the place, dazed by the amount of fight Beckett had in her lithe body.

Esposito was squatting and staring at something that glinted a little differently from the floor. It took Castle a beat to realize that it was a syringe.

"Ketamine," Esposito choked out, examining the label of a clear bottle that had rolled almost entirely underneath the bed.

"To sedate her," Castle whispered.

"Okay," he heard Esposito murmur to himself as he stood. "Okay."

"We need to…" Ryan began, but he trailed off, looking around the room, eyes distant.

"Get Montgomery on the phone," Esposito snapped at him. "We need an APB with her face on it at every precinct and every local station in the next ten minutes – Kennedy and Jones can get that out. Get him to send forensics over here immediately, and for fuck's sake have someone over there let her dad and Lanie know so they don't have to hear it on the news."

Ryan nodded, pulled out his phone, and walked into the living room.

"He wouldn't have made noise coming in," Castle said, his voice coming out so much calmer than he felt. Haines, Garabaldi, and Esposito stared at him. "He would have dressed as someone unobtrusive, a locksmith, and made a copy of the key yesterday, maybe the day before. She would have been sleeping. She would have been sleeping and she wouldn't have woken up, because he would have entered silently, because she was exhausted. He would have taken the Ketamine and jammed it into her bicep or her hip, and that would have hurt her, would have woken her up. And she would have lunged for her service weapon on the side table, but," he looked down at the table, "but Tyson would have dealt with that first. He would have known that he never could have left alive if she'd been able to get her weapon."

Castle moved into the living room, Haines and Garabaldi and Esposito trailing him. "She would have run in here. She would have tried to get out. She would have started to feel the sedative taking effect and she would have known that she had to move fast. And Tyson would have caught her, would have grabbed her near the coffee table, and she would have fought him and fought him but her limbs would have gotten heavier and heavier until, eventually, all Tyson had to do was just stand there and watch her collapse."

They are all silent for a moment, his words hanging heavy in the air between them. "The text," Esposito prompted.

Castle floundered, then felt it suddenly, horrifyingly click into place. "Jesus Christ, he was here. They were here. I called her name from the hallway. I thought I heard a thump. I called out again. I said it was me. I said it wasn't seven. I said I hoped she wasn't at the precinct. There was no answer. I took out my phone to call her and right then I got the text. Tyson was here and he heard me. He would have gotten her phone. He would have texted. I was right here."

It was suddenly too much and he couldn't get in enough air and his stomach was violently convulsing. He bent over, put his hands on his knees, tried to suck in oxygen.

Over the roar in his ears, he heard Esposito's far-away voice saying, "Don't you fucking dare vomit in here, Castle."

A firm hand on his back pushed him upright and out into the hallway, where he stumbled against the wall. Haines grabbed a freezer bag from his pocket and held it up. "You need to throw up, you do it in the hallway and you do it in this," he said, voice low and steady. "We have enough problems here without worrying about a contaminated scene."

"I was here," he said, staring vacantly at Garabaldi. "I was here."

Garabaldi looked at him without pity. "So were we," he said. When Castle glanced up, he could see a fraction of his own guilt mirrored in the guard's eyes, and, for some reason, it quelled enough of the nausea that he could straighten up.

"She's still alive," Castle said as Ryan and Esposito stepped into the hallway. "The ketamine, the fight – it wouldn't have – he wouldn't have gone through the trouble unless…" he trailed off. "I don't know. But he wouldn't have gone through the trouble."

"Agreed," Esposito said.

"What now?" Castle asked, suddenly itching, tingling violently with the raw need to do _something_.

"The APBs are out," Ryan said. "Montgomery's heading in now and pulling in all the manpower we could need, and the forensics team should be here soon."

"Nobody's going back in there 'till forensics clears it," Esposito added.

"We'll find her," Castle said, abruptly, vehemently certain, because there was no other option, because when he said the words he found that he could feel and think and breathe again.

"We will," Ryan said.

Castle took a deep breath, tried to channel his energy, and suddenly realized that he was standing next to the apartment adjacent to Beckett's. Without another word, he rapped on it, called, "NYPD! We need to ask you some questions. Open up."

"Christ, Castle," Esposito said, jerking a notepad out of his pocket.

A middle-aged man with dark hair and plaid pajama pants opened the door.

"What?" he snapped, scrubbing at his eyes.

Ryan held his badge up. "You hear anything unusual early this morning, Sir?"

"Ah, hell," he sighed, leaning against the doorframe. "Yeah, 'round, I don't know, maybe 6 am, there was a helluva racket. Why, something happen?"

"That's what we're trying to determine," Esposito said, sizing the man up.

"You didn't check it out or call the police?" Castle bit out.

"Look, man. Used to be every other week or so, the couple two doors down had fights. Fuckin' loud fights. It hasn't happened in a while now - the last time was right after the lady next door in 18C moved in, and she's a cop, you know. She heard it and she hauled the dude straight down to central booking, but you know this system – he was back that afternoon. So, yeah, I guess maybe this morning it was worse than usual, but everyone who's been around'll tell you, it's nothing we're not used to. I put in some earplugs and went back to sleep."

Ryan stared at the man. Unfazed, he stared back. "Thanks for your time," Esposito finally said. The man slammed the door.

When they found her, because there was no question that they would find her, Castle thought, he was buying her an apartment, no, a penthouse, one with huge glass windows and a view of Central Park, one where two or three security guards checked people on entrance and there were cameras in every hallway and nobody could ever just enter and plant a bomb, nobody could fight raucously at six am without causing an uproar, nobody could walk right out with a drugged, injured woman.

"Well," said Ryan, voice a little too hoarse, "Let's keep knocking."

Castle followed him, but his mind went back to the break room, back to the soft darkness that enveloped them just after they had finally pulled their lips apart, back to the swollen curve of her lower lip, back to the darkness of her dilated pupils, back to the firmness of her stomach pressing up into his, back to the steady, warm rhythm of her chest heaving, in and out, in and out, against him.

* * *

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Okay, just as a general disclaimer and to give you an idea of where my brain is currently with this story (like there were really any more questions after this chapter): I listen to happy bouncy ridiculous Christmas music all the time because I am That Kind of Person. While writing this chapter and some of the upcoming chapters, I opened my iTunes and played Something Corporate's "Forget December." On repeat. (In case you are unfamiliar, to give you a general idea of the atmosphere created by this lovely tune I shall provide the first three lines here: "On Christmas morning/ It was pouring/All was hopeless in this home." It's kind of a good song anyways, I swear).

Also, you were all so AMAZING with your wonderful beautiful little singing elf reviews (am I muddling my metaphor? I just don't know. I need more sleep), even though some of them picked up little elfin pitchforks because of the inconvenient place where I may have happened to have left off, that I was kind of ridiculously quick with this.

Oh and I do apologize for all that cussing but mostly I figured the situation warranted.


	9. Chapter 9

Her head hurt.

Her head hurt and her wrist ached.

Her head hurt and her wrist ached and her mouth was full of cotton and her back was on fire.

Her head hurt and her wrist ached and her mouth was full of cotton and her back was on fire and her hands and feet felt weighted, trapped.

Beckett blinked her eyes open to a dingy room lit only by a dim, flickering bulb.

"Good morning, gorgeous," she heard from a corner. Tyson moved a step toward her but stayed half hidden in shadow. "You're awake."

She started to respond, but the words died on the back of her tongue. She couldn't quite get the air she needed, and finally her still-asleep brain registered the pressure of a gag in her mouth.

"I'm sorry about all this. I really am," Tyson said, taking another step forward. He didn't look sorry, Beckett thought, her eyes flicking over him. He looked angry. His nose and cheekbone were bruised and swollen, and he walked with a limp.

_She had woken with a start to the cold, sharp metal of a knife pressed against her neck and a fiery pain surging through her hip. The room was dark, but she didn't need the clock's green glow to see the contours of Tyson's face; she knew who it was, and she knew that his first instinct wouldn't be to slit her throat. She lay still for one heartbeat, two, then pushed Tyson's knife arm down and away and surged forward, ramming her forehead into his nose. A syringe's needle fell out of her hip as she sprung (too late, her brain registered as a liquid burn swam through her leg). Tyson yelled and staggered back and she lunged for the side table, yanking the drawer out, reaching for her service weapon. It wasn't there. She'd left herself open, and Tyson rammed a shoulder into her stomach and sent her stumbling against the table, which toppled to the floor with such force that the lamp and clock shattered, scattering pieces of metal and glass across the room. She kicked out from her awkward position on her side, half lying on the side table, and her feet connected with his ankle. She could feel it twist slightly, could feel his body curve and stumble sideways, and she charged past him into the living room._

Flexing, she realized her ankles were attached to the legs of a wooden chair and her hands were bound behind her. She twisted her wrists. They were tied tightly.

Tyson noticed her movement. A smile quirked his lips. "A little snug, hm? I'd ease up, but you taught me the hard way not to underestimate you."

He watched her silently as she looked around the room. They must have been in a basement – the walls were rough cement, and there were no windows. A twin bed sat in the corner of the room, a battered writer's desk next to it, two small chairs in another corner. One door, open, that led to a bathroom; the other door, closed, would be the only exit. Easy door, easy knob, but tied the way she was, she'd never get to it.

_The door seemed further away than normal, and, in spite of his bloody nose and his injured ankle, Tyson caught up to her before she was halfway across the living room. She kept her distance and swung a leg around to connect with his shins, to knock him over, but her body was half a second behind where it always was, and he deflected her leg as he grabbed her wrist and twisted, hard. Ignoring the pain crackling through her forearm, she went on the offensive and lunged forward, but again she was too slow, and their brief, violent scuffle ended with her crashing back into the coffee table. The glass top shattered and she fell onto the shards, her head slamming on the floor. Her vision grayed, tunneled, and she might have passed out had she not had the fierce pain of the glass in her back to focus her, to give her a point in consciousness to cling to._

Keeping her eyes on Tyson, she mentally worked her way up her body. Both feet fine; right ankle slightly sore, but she was sure she could move on it; left hip bruised; stomach and chest fine; back twinging with every breath – lacerations?; hands probably fine but tingling from the tightness of the rope around them; right wrist had a bone-deep ache that could have been a sprain or a break; left wrist and both forearms fine; both biceps sore, but probably just bruised; shoulders fine; neck fine; head had a sharp ache that could have been a combination of coming off the sedative and a concussion.

"You feeling a little beat up, there?" Tyson asked, grinning, stalking toward her.

She didn't like that he saw into her so well. _Fuck you, Tyson_, she wanted to say, or, _What kind of game do you think you're playing? _But she was pretty certain she wouldn't have been able to speak articulately through the gag, and like hell she was going to start saying something and have it come out as an incoherent whimper.

"You were a real pain in my ass, you know," Tyson continued, towering above her.

_He came at her and, still fighting for consciousness, she kicked up at him ferociously. She connected with his groin, and he stumbled backwards into the television, knocking it to the floor, shouting, "Bitch!" _

_She grabbed the edge of the couch to lift herself, but her arms weren't responding right and her legs were weak, trembling. She tried to scream, to shout for help, but her thoughts were jumbled and the yell tumbled around her throat, coming out incoherent and slurred and far, far too quiet._

She felt a brief surge of panic claw at her and breathed steadily through her nose to quell it. Tyson smiled down at her. She glared back up at him.

"I have plans," Tyson told her, conversationally, pulling up a chair so that he was sitting close, too close to her. "Good plans. Not like the past week – I scrambled, I didn't think things through enough, and I paid for it. It should have been a better week for me."

His eyes roamed over her. "Has it been a good week for you and your writer, Detective Beckett?"

She couldn't help it – her jaw clenched when he mentioned Castle.

Tyson smiled.

_She was only just able to jerk herself out of the way when Tyson lunged at her with the knife; he missed, and, enraged, dragged it through a couch cushion. She stumbled towards the door, but clumsily, and after three steps she staggered, her ankle wrenching. Tyson must have gotten control of himself; he walked calmly around and placed himself between her and the exit. She awkwardly lunged for him, unwilling to give up but unable to make her body cooperate. She missed and fell to her knees, then, her muscles failing, dizzily spiraling towards unconsciousness, she slumped into a sitting position on the floor. _

_Her head was spinning and there was a distant roaring in her ears and she felt like vomiting or passing out, but a distant rapping brought her halfway back. Tyson was next to her in a second, his hand clamping over her mouth. She jerked her head, weakly, but his hand was firm and she didn't think she could have yelled anyway. _

"It's almost sad," Tyson said, still smiling, "how stupid you all were. I mean, I get putting guards on Martha and Alexis and Gina, but, really, did nobody think to watch you?"

Hindsight being what it was, Beckett could acknowledge his point. She'd been too worried about Castle to think of her own safety, Castle had been too worried about his daughter, and Montgomery and Ryan and Esposito and Kennedy and Jones and everyone else involved in the investigation hadn't questioned how she'd allocated manpower and resources.

"I know, I know," Tyson said, "After that little redhead in the alley, you were obviously worried about the kid, and that blond bombshell of a girlfriend was an obvious target, too. But," he cocked his head, reached over, and patted her shoulder (she jerked away so fiercely that she had to fight a sudden, violent bout of vertigo), "there's just something about you, Detective."

_As the drug burned through her veins and she slid towards unconsciousness, she heard Castle's voice, echoing through the roar in her ears, calling her name. It was enough to pull her back to some wakefulness, enough to put the fight back in her, enough to make her swing up and connect with Tyson's jaw. He tipped backward with a thump, but so did she, trembling and spent, stars shooting through her vision. "Where's your fucking phone?" she heard him hiss as she slipped toward blissful unawareness. _

_As her vision blacked she thought she heard Castle's voice again, and it soothed her, melding into a hazy recollection of the night before – _"You, my dear Detective Beckett, need sleep" – _and with the memory of those words and of his fingers tumbling through her hair and of the warm rough stubble of his jawbone scraping against her cheek, she sank into unconsciousness. _

* * *

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THANK YOU again to all of you out there reading and reviewing! Even though now most of your adorable singing elf reviews have picked up pitchforks and I believe are often engaged in doing something ominous like dancing evilly around a bonfire at midnight in the freezing cold (I am sure they are still singing happy Christmas carols as they do this, but given their creepy behavior it's really turning into something like an episode of The X-Files with the juxtaposition of the adorable happy music on one hand and the horrifying Oh Sweet Jesus Something Bad Is Happening on the other hand).

(Yes, thanks for noticing, I _am _incoherent).

(Also, no, this insanity will NOT be the usual pace of updates. It's either the holiday season or I've started taking uppers without realizing it, but I'm pretty sure I'm currently on a sleep schedule that is sustainable only for Will Ferrell in _Elf _or a giraffe, which, fun fact, sleeps the least of any mammal).


	10. Chapter 10

The entire bullpen was buzzing frenetically, filled with the hum of fast-paced phone calls and a constantly-growing crowd of cops sorting through documents. Beckett's and Esposito's and Ryan's desks were all buried under stacks of paper, everything from evidence logs from Tyson's first murders to the forensics data just coming in from the apartment. The murder board was crowded with sharp, hasty strokes from a dry erase that was on its last legs but that nobody had found the time to replace.

They'd arrived back at the precinct over an hour earlier, after spending too long knocking on too many of Beckett's neighbors' doors and coming up with absolutely no useful information. Montgomery had been busy yelling at a cluster of detectives about a getting some more thorough background, and every corner of the room had already been crammed with officers snapping into phones about ABPs or reading through files on Tyson or running the traffic cams near Beckett's apartment. The intense, chaotic energy of the place had been heartening at first, but it wore him down as time went on and no solid leads emerged.

Castle leaned back, his eyes exhausted from frantically reading and rereading every profile they had on Tyson. "We're not seeing the big picture here," he said.

"What's the big picture?" Ryan asked, rubbing his eyes.

"If he could see it, he would have told you already," Esposito growled. He was hunched over some document with miniscule print.

Castle nodded. "We just – I can't pin it down. He has her someplace important. Someplace that has a special meaning to him. Or he'll bring her to one. The escalation from Marisa, murdered on site, to Angela, who was held hostage and moved somewhere significant, to Beckett, who…" he trailed off, stomach clenching.

"So where's special? Where's important?" Ryan asked.

They sat there in silence, staring at each other. Suddenly, Castle's phone, sitting in the middle of Beckett's desk, trilled sharply. _Kate Beckett_, the screen read. He lunged for it.

Esposito clapped his hand over Castle's, and he spoke in a rush. "Do _not _beg. He has enough power. Don't give him more. But keep him on. We'll patch in, record, and try a trace."

Castle nodded and accepted the call. His hands were shaking.

"Hi, Jerry," he said, keeping his voice low and even.

"Rick, long time," Tyson said. "How've you been?"

"Oh, you know. A little stressed lately," Castle bit out.

Tyson chuckled. "I can imagine."

"What's up, Jerry? Just saying hello?" He violently swallowed what he wanted to say: _Where is she what do you want I will give you anything anything at all._

"I called because I've been having this feeling, this amazing feeling for the past couple hours, and it suddenly occurred to me that you might be the only person in the world who would understand," Tyson said conversationally.

"Tell me," Castle responded. _Just let her go just let her go._

"I've been reading your books lately, you know, because I thought you were interesting. And first, can I just say, you're pretty good."

"Thanks, Jerry," Castle gritted out. _Don't hurt her don't touch her or I swear to Christ I'll kill you you goddamn bastard._

_You're doing great_, Ryan mouthed.

"And you had such a good thing going with Derrick, and it took me a minute to get why you would kill the poor bastard, but it gets _boring_, doesn't it? Doing the same old thing, day after day, over and over. God, people are so scared of mayhem and destruction and death, but I think the most frightening thing in the world is predictability. You understand, don't you, Rick?"

"Yes," he answered, a little too honestly. The hairs on his arms were standing straight up.

"But then Kate Beckett comes along, and she, well, she makes things fun, doesn't she, Rick? She makes it feel like maybe your life was okay before, maybe you hadn't had anything to complain about, but all the sudden when she's around everything is just amazing, everything is just _right_."

Suddenly, for the second time that morning, Castle was fighting the overpowering urge to vomit.

"I mean, Christ, you get half hard just looking at her. But then you figure out she's smart, and then you figure out she's got some serious spunk."

Castle's throat and mouth were too dry to speak. He clenched the phone against his ear and rested his forehead on a hand.

"And it's not always great spunk – I'm pretty sure the bitch broke my nose – but it's almost a shame to kill her, she's so much goddamn _fun_."

Castle forced himself to speak, his voice coming out tight and choked. "You know, Jerry, you don't _have_ to kill her."

"See, that's where you got it wrong, Rick! I'm pretty positive you never fucked her – and, let me tell you, I don't know why the hell not; I have half a mind to do it myself - but you missed the best part of your entertainment. I'm not going to miss mine – she's only as much fun as she is because every time I look at her, I picture a rope around her neck as she gasps for breath and her eyes slowly close."

"Don't touch her you fucker," Castle hissed, his composure finally, irretrievably lost.

"But maybe you can help me," Tyson continued, ignoring him. "See, I keep fantasizing, but I think you have a better chance of predicting it than me, given how well you know her. Just before I kill her, do you think that she'll beg for her life? Or do you think that she'll cry? Or do you think she'll just sit there stoically? My money's on the sitting there stoically, but I'm hoping for a few silent tears." The line abruptly went dead.

Castle's eyes stung and his pulse was hammering in his throat so desperately that it was hard to breathe, but the worst was the tremor in his hand, the constant shake that wouldn't stop. He turned to Beckett's desk, picked up a coffee mug (it was one of chunky ceramic ones, _NYPD _lettered in blocky print across it), and hurled it into the exposed brick wall. It shattered satisfyingly. _There_, he thought, staring at his now-still hand, _that fixed it_. He imagined that the bullpen had grown silent and that everyone was starting at him, but he couldn't hear over the pounding of his pulse or look anywhere but the scattered ceramic shards on the floor.

He focused on breathing for two seconds, five seconds, ten, finally rasped, "Did you get the trace?" at Ryan.

Ryan didn't answer, and when he finally brought himself to turn and look, the younger man was slumped in his chair, the heels of his hands digging into his eyes. Esposito was standing over him, one hand resting on the younger man's shoulder, the other hand clenched into a tight fist. Kennedy and Jones and Haines and Garabaldi had all edged closer. The rest of the cops in the bullpen were watching. Montgomery was striding quickly toward them from his office.

"Pull it _together_," he snapped, then paused, looking at their faces. "What?"

"Just – replay the call for him," Esposito said, voice hushed, "and Jones, get a copy to the techs to check for anything we can use from the background."

Castle stood up and walked into the break room – he didn't need to hear it again to remember every word of Tyson's (couldn't hear it again if he wanted to keep any of his sanity). Lanie was standing near the coffee machine, hovering around where Beckett had been not so many hours before. "That was Tyson, on the phone," she said, more a statement than a question. She stared at Castle appraisingly. He could only imagine how he looked.

He inclined his head, a slight nod. He hadn't spoken to Lanie since they'd gotten back from Becektt's apartment, but earlier he'd seen her having an angry, muted conversation with Esposito in the corner of the bullpen.

"Beckett would've kicked your ass if she'd seen you break her mug."

He flinched. "Please don't say _Beckett would've,_" he whispered. If he cried, he reminded himself, if he cried in the precinct then when Beckett came back she would find out about it and she would taunt him incessantly for being a girl.

Lanie blinked slowly, then rephrased. "Beckett will kick your ass when she finds out that you broke her mug."

He spoke around the lump in his throat. "I really screwed up, Lanie. I don't even know how I could have – I've never screwed up something so badly in my life."

Lanie reached over and squeezed his arm. "Honey, we all screwed up."

_I was there_, he wanted to say to her, but he'd said it over and over and he was sure that everyone in the precinct was prepared to punch him if they heard him whine that particular phrase again, so he tried to explain the bone-deep ache in his chest in a different way. "I kissed her last night. In here. Almost where you're standing."

"Good for you, Castle," Lanie said, her lips quirking up slightly, "growing some big-kid balls."

"I can't help but wonder…"

She smacked him, hard, on the back of his head. "In no way did your make-out session contribute to her disappearance. I will not spend my day getting you over some stupid abandonment issue."

"Right," he sighed, "sorry." He tried to pull the pieces of himself back to some semblance of coherency. They would have finished listening to the call by now.

He looked back at Lanie, who smiled at him, took a deep breath, put on her game face. "She's a fantastic kisser, isn't she?"

His brain stuttered. "W – what?"

Lanie leered knowingly at him in response, and he went with it, grasping at the shred of normalcy. "Was that a joke? Because that image is now forever seared onto my brain, and it is not at all funny to tease me like that."

"Come on, Castle," she said, walking out into the bullpen, her steps measured. "Let's get to work."

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Oh goodness. Please tell all your Christmas-song-singing pitchfork-carrying caffeine-addiction-enabling elfin reviews that I am quite sorry that this chapter did not exactly help Beckett and Castle out in terms of their rather sad predicament. Hopefully it wasn't too creepy for their (or your) little elf selves. It was kind of creepy for me, but maybe it is just because I am discovering the serial killer inside of me. (If there is not a country song with that title - Discovering the Serial Killer Inside of Me - there should be. Think of the possibilities. Or... don't.)

ALSO. I ran out of sugar for my coffee this morning. I run on coffee, but not black coffee. So I stared in my fridge for a while, and there was a jug of maple syrup (YES a jug are you judging me right now?) and I thought to myself, "I have friends that have put maple syrup in their coffee to sweeten it, right?" And I really almost did it. BUT THEN I REMEMBERED IT WAS ONE OF YOUR SINGING ELF REVIEWS OFFERING ME A CUP OF MAPLE SYRUP COFFEE. Or something similar. And you really shouldn't confuse me with things like that, because (1) I am on a terrible sleep schedule (2) I am not functional, by any definition of the word, in the mornings and (3) I am apparently walking a fine line between an average American middle-class employee and psychotic serial killer.


	11. Chapter 11

Tyson hung up the phone, walked to over to Beckett, and untied her gag, carefully lifting the coarse fabric away from her lips.

She was pretty sure what the result would be, but she let out one hoarse yell, then another, then another, hoping for the off chance that someone would hear her. The screaming sent bolts of pain through her head and back, but was a good pain, a focusing pain, a pain that distracted her from the pervading anger that had wrapped itself around her during Tyson's phone call. She quieted when she noticed Tyson smiling at her.

"Not gonna help you, sweetie, but by all means, continue. Nothing I like more than hearing a gorgeous woman scream."

She narrowed her eyes and pressed her lips together in a thin line, sure that she wouldn't be shouting for help again unless she was more certain that someone might hear.

"Sorry you had to hear that conversation," he said in the same casual tone with which he'd spoken to Castle. She blinked slowly. She'd been disturbed by what Tyson had been saying about her, but the worst part had been knowing that it was Castle on the other end of the line. _Anyone but him_, she'd kept thinking, _just pick someone else to mind-fuck._

"Are you?" was all she asked, the words scraping over her larynx.

He grinned. "No, not especially."

"I don't get it," she rasped, not particularly interested in hearing any more about her own future and trying desperately to steer the conversation away from Tyson's talk with Castle. "I don't get why you waited months to start again, and I don't get why Marisa Harington and I don't get why Angela Branson."

Tyson was still grinning as he grabbed a wooden chair from the corner of the room and pulled it close to her. When he sat, his knee brushed against hers. He reached out a hand and laid his palm against the side of her thigh, his fingertips resting lightly just below her hipbone.

She hadn't noticed what she'd been wearing before that moment – she'd had more pressing concerns – but the feeling of his palm flat against her leg made her hyperaware of the thin material of her grey cotton leggings, of the too-revealing, strappy tank top that was the only thing covering her torso.

She sat stone-still, barely breathing, her skin prickling.

"I started again with the blonde at Barnard because I felt bored and unfulfilled and I thought maybe if I could just get one more girl, I wouldn't feel so listless, so disappointed." He trailed into silence.

"But it didn't help," she pressed.

She tensed involuntarily as his thumb rubbed absently over her thigh. "It didn't help at all. I went to Barnard because, well, because I used to know a girl who wound up going there, because I thought maybe taking a trip close to memory lane would be fun, would get me out of my funk. But it was _too _easy, you know? It just wasn't fun, not even that moment right before she died when I could look into her eyes and see that she accepted it, not even those final jerks of her legs right before she went still."

"So you did something different," Beckett prompted, willing her breathing to be less shallow, her muscles to be less rigid.

"Of course. I thought, long and hard, about what would be more fulfilling, and for some reason my mind just kept drifting back to your writer friend. You understand, don't you? He screws up your life – by shadowing you, by blowing your cover, doesn't matter – and it's a fun prospect to mess with him a little in return, to tease him a little."

"I'm pretty sure there's some kind of line between verbal sparring and killing a kid."

He grinned at her. "If you need to think that, go ahead. Anyway, I had only really been thinking about him, thinking about how maybe it would be more interesting, more fun¸ to do something that would have a greater impact, when I saw Angela that very afternoon, walking out of York Prep, York Prep, of all places, where I'd only been to see if maybe I could spot someone who looked like Castle's kid – I do my homework, Detective – now go ahead and tell me that's not fate. It was so easy to follow her for a while in a stolen van and just scoop her off the sidewalk when nobody was watching. Then I just had to tie her up and wait until I could be sure of my privacy, until I could drag her to the alley just outside his home and kill her."

His hand tightened on her thigh as his story built until her skin and muscles were on fire and she knew she would have vivid bruises (even if she didn't live long enough to see them). At least, she thought, it was a distraction from the pounding in her head, the burning in her back, the ache in her wrist, the thought of Castle's panicked face. "But you didn't like that, either," she said, ignoring the fire searing her leg.

"It was awful," he said, clenching his hand on her thigh even tighter. She bit the inside of her cheek to hold back a gasp. "She was so young, and she just kept crying. And her hair, Christ, I couldn't stop looking at how red it was. Even with Marisa, even when it was a little bit boring, there was always this amazing, incredible feeling of release. After I'd killed the redhead, I cried. I felt so awful, like I'd just killed a little girl."

"You had," Beckett said, voice brittle.

"Don't worry," he said, his fingers still burning into her thigh, as he leaned closer to her and reached up with his other hand to brush her hair behind her ear. She swallowed convulsively as the pads of his fingertips roughed over her temple. "I've made sure that won't happen with you. You'll be perfect."

He got up abruptly, walked over to a corner of the room, and rummaged around in a small, black duffle. When he turned, he was clutching a colorful cardboard box and a syringe.

"Where are we?" Beckett asked, hoping to distract him.

"Oh, I've done plenty of talking, don't you think? I despise people who talk and talk and never get anything done. I'm big on getting things done, Kate."

"I see that," she said coldly.

"Now, you'll have to bear with me. I've never died anyone's hair before," he continued, laying out the contents of the cardboard box on the battered desk.

"You're serious," Beckett said, her hackles raised. The thought of him dying her hair seemed strangely, terrifyingly intimate, even if it would buy her time. "You don't think it's a little pathetic, Tyson? You're not man enough to kill a brunette?"

He whipped around. She knew she'd pressed a button. "What do you know about being man enough?" he snapped.

"You tell me, Tyson. I haven't seen you go after anyone who could fight back. Even me, you had to wait until I was passed out in bed and then you had to drug me. So what is it about murdering defenseless women that turns you on, Jerry?"

"You don't know what you're fucking talking about," he growled, eyes dark.

_Stop pushing_, a voice (a voice that sounded surprisingly like Castle, and since when had he ever been her voice of reason?) echoed in her head, but she couldn't stop the slideshow of the dead women's faces that danced through her mind, couldn't stop herself from replaying the look in Castle's eyes when they'd first discovered Angela Branson. "You have trouble getting it up when you're not strangling helpless girls, Jerry?"

He took two long steps across the room and slapped her, hard, on the cheek. Her head snapped to the side, and the salty tang of blood filled her mouth. She fought to stay conscious, pushing through the roar in her ears and the spots in her vision. He grabbed her chin between his fingers and forced her eyes up to him. His face swam. "You want to see me get it up, bitch?"

She stayed silent, fighting back the intense nausea from the raucous pain pulsing through her skull.

"I thought so." He released her chin, walked back to the desk, and continued mixing the dye. She bowed her head and concentrated on breathing deeply, willing her stomach to stop roiling, drifting toward unconsciousness and then back again.

She came all the way back to the feeling of his plastic-encased fingers twisting harshly through her hair, her scalp tingling. She jerked away weakly.

He threaded his fingers through her hair and yanked her head back toward him. "Screw you," she murmured, swallowing a groan.

"I cannot believe," he growled, "that I am the first man to want to strangle you."

"Christ, Tyson, are you fucking joking with me right now?" she moaned, jerking her head away again.

"You can't take life too seriously, Kate. I think your lovely writer was just starting to teach you that. Do you think he'll start taking life more seriously after they find your body?" His gloved hands dug into her scalp.

She swallowed convulsively, reminded herself that he was going for a reaction and that jumping every time the man mentioned Castle would only make things worse. "He'll be fine. I'm sure the media frenzy around my death and the posthumous dedication in his next book will spike sales," she said, closing her eyes, stars bursting at the corners of her vision.

"You'll be a gorgeous blonde," he said, ignoring her comment as he stepped away and regarded her. "We have 30 minutes, and then we'll rinse that off you – we wouldn't want to burn your scalp, would we?"

"Chivalrous, Tyson," Beckett mumbled, trying not to think of _how_ he would rinse it off, because thus far she'd been able to beat back the panic fluttering at her chest.

Turning back to the desk, he grabbed the syringe and a vial. "Oh, come on," Beckett said, lifting her chin so that she was staring up into his face.

He smiled over at her. "Do you think I'm stupid, Kate?"

"I think I'm concussed, banged up, tied up, and still drugged from the first go round, and I think you need to grow a pair, Tyson," she spat.

"And _I _think you're trying to provoke me into doing something that I know is against my best interests." He moved back toward her, the dim light reflecting slightly off a clear liquid in the syringe.

"You must not have a lot of faith in yourself," she growled.

"Stop panicking, Kate," he said with a smile. She narrowed her eyes. "It's only a tiny bit, just enough to take the edge off. You won't even be unconscious."

She grit her teeth as he pulled her leggings off her right hip, efficiently exposing a swathe of skin and jamming the needle into it before she could so much as flinch, then pulling the cotton back up and patting her thigh jovially.

Her world spun, hazed, fragmented. The next chunk of time she remembered only in fractured segments:

Tyson's hands on her ankles, working deftly on the knots of her bonds, pulling the ropes off. Pins and needles bursting through her legs.

His arms wrapped around her ribs, hauling her to her feet. Her knees wobbling, giving out. Him half carrying, half dragging her toward the bathroom.

An icy spray on her face. Gasping for breath through the needles of water slamming into her nose, mouth, eyes. Shivering violently, every motion lancing pain through her head, her back. Tyson's hand roughly dragging through her hair.

Wanting only to wrap herself into a ball, her arms still bound behind her. Slumped on the floor of the shower, world spinning, convulsing with shudders, still choking desperately.

Kate Beckett was not a woman who needed other people. Her father always told her that he'd known how fiercely independent she was ever since she was five and scraped all the skin off her knee in a tumble off a curb and then insisted upon cleaning and bandaging the blood-soaked wound herself. Her mother's death and father's alcoholism and subsequent time as a cop had turned her intractable independence into what many might call (and had called) her primary character trait. But just this once, she thought, only this one time, it would be so nice to have the cavalry burst through the door and give her a hand (it would be so nice to look up and see Castle leaning down, his brow knit with concern but his eyes sparkling, whispering, "Here, it's okay, you're okay, I've got you, Beckett," and making everything else melt away).

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I am sorry, my little Christmas elfies! You are so very nice to me and you come dancing around singing me holiday tunes about how I made you palpitate and want to die with anxiety and it all just makes my heart swell with happiness, and all you ask in return is that I just go ahead and FIX IT for Castle and Beckett, and then this is what I give you. To be fair, it's really not me that's doing it, it's creepy-ass Tyson, who really needs to get a life or a girlfriend or at least eat some chocolate or something.

So I somehow managed to produce this for you not just over Christmas, but over Christmas in Hawaii, listening to Mele Kalikimaka and sipping a mai tai, and I most definitely cannot get over my inherent creepiness (to be fair, it was mostly written during a rain storm when I was sitting in the living room, staring oh-so-very sulkily between the very-wet beach and my pasty-white skin). And my grandmother, who lives in this Tropical Paradise of Love and Happiness (which it is at all times except when it is a Depressing Land of Too Much Rain) and who would never understand the Doom and Gloom that the Endless Winter brings, is, of course, all, "What are you writing, dear?" "Oh," I say, "a memo" (which, well, is what I _should_ have been writing). BUT ANYWAYS, my point is that (nope, didn't really have a great one to begin with) you all with your reviews and their whips from Santa/jugs of maple syrup coffee /hysterical running around/disco dancing/sad, pleading words and eyes have reduced me to LYING TO MY EXTREMELY, EXTREMELY OLD GRANDMOTHER. I hope you are all happy with yourselves.


	12. Chapter 12

The bullpen had grown quieter in the hours since Beckett had disappeared. A small troop of detectives had left to more thoroughly canvass her apartment and surrounding neighborhood. Kennedy and his team were out on a tenuous van ID from Angela Branson's kidnapping. Karapowski and Jenkins (the latter of whom, along with two more senior detectives, had set up a temporary home away from the 21st in a corner near the break room after they'd heard of Beckett's disappearance) were uptown, looking into some possible information on Marisa Harrington. Haines and Garabaldi had given up all pretense of merely guarding and were both paging intently through stacks of paper. Castle wasn't used to a case moving in quite so many simultaneous, diverging directions; it set him even more on edge.

He was scanning the latest forensics from Beckett's apartment for the third time (he was on the most satisfying part, the one that described, in detail, a spatter pattern near her bed that indicated she'd given Tyson one hell of a bloody nose) when his phone chirruped insistently from where it lay, buried under several reports on Beckett's desk. His heart thrummed irregularly, but it was just a text from Alexis – _Can you call me now?_

He sighed, rubbed his eyes, and dialed. "What's up, pumpkin?"

"Is Detective Beckett really in trouble, Dad?"

"Aren't you supposed to be in psych right now?"

"Is that really what you're going to focus on?"

"How do you know what's happening in the outside world when you should be intently listening to your teacher?"

"Is this going to be one of times when you keep answering my questions with questions and then blame it on the Greeks? Because I already told you that Socratic questioning doesn't really work like that."

"You should. You should be in psych right now."

"Dad!"

"Yes," he said, cagey.

"Yes, Detective Beckett is in trouble," Alexis prompted.

"Yes," he said again.

"Do you think that maybe you should have told me so I wouldn't have had to hear it from Sandra, who heard from Sophie who heard from Jake who was on Facebook during calculus and saw a post on the NY1 News page that Rick Castle's muse was kidnapped and was already quite possibly strangled by the Triple Killer?"

Castle pinched the bridge of his nose. "I really hadn't envisioned that particular scenario."

"Is she…" Alexis trailed off.

"We're still trying to find her. You, darling daughter, need to get yourself back into class and not think about it."

"Seriously?"

"Seriously. I'm not sorry I didn't tell you, but I'm sorry you had to hear like that."

He heard her capitulation in her worried sigh. "You'll call if anything…"

"I'll call. I love you," he said, fighting the sudden, fierce desire to have her detail drive her to the precinct so he could give her a hug.

"Love you, too, Dad. Be careful."

When he hung up, Ryan was watching him. "Offspring trouble?" he asked.

"Word of Beckett has spread to New York City's high schools."

"That's good," Esposito said, pausing momentarily from scrawling on the whiteboard. "The more people who know, the better chance we have that someone spots something."

The phone chirruped again. "I told her to go to psy –" He stopped instantly as he glanced down, words dying in his throat.

Ryan, who had been paying the closest attention, was on his feet immediately, his chair crashing over in his rush to stand. He left it lying on the floor as he stared at the phone.

"Let's, um. A cable. For the computer. To pull it up." Ryan stuttered.

Castle wordlessly reached into Beckett's desk, pulled out a cord, and slowly, deliberately, managed to plug his phone into her computer while never taking his eyes off Tyson's most recent message.

Esposito stretched over him, clicked through a couple file folders, and filled the screen with the picture. Almost immediately, hushed whispers ricocheted through the bullpen, and before long a small knot of detectives was staring wordlessly at the monitor.

The picture was a little fuzzy and the light was dim, but the camera phone had done an adequate job, and the details of the scene were clear. The image of Beckett filled the screen, and while Castle kept telling himself that he should be grateful that she was alive, he couldn't quite manage to summon that particular emotion.

Her ankles were bound to a small, battered wooden chair, and her hands were clearly tied behind her. Her whole body was soaked, covered in droplets of water, and from the arc of her arm and the tension in her legs, she looked like she might have been in the middle of a shiver. Her feet were bare. She was wearing only thin, grey, soaked cotton leggings and a wet maroon tank top that was halfway off one shoulder. Her lip was split and swollen. Her hair was soaked, dripping tendrils curled around her cheeks, and unmistakably blonde. Her jaw was set, and she was staring at the camera, her eyes glassy (from the Ketamine? from an injury?), but still glinting defiantly.

The text message, sent just after the image, read only, _Do you still think she's sexy as a blonde?_

Castle was the first one to speak. "We're out of time," he rasped.

"Send it to tech," Montgomery said quietly. "See if they can pull anything useful from it."

"Out of time?" Garabaldi asked.

Esposito caught on. "He's got himself set up now."

Ryan did, too. "Castle – the rest of us, too, but mostly Castle – distraught, and with no leads."

Castle finished hoarsely. "And now Beckett fits his profile." He got up, ripping his eyes away from the monitor, and walked to the break room, where he sat on the couch, slumped forward, and buried his face in his hands.

He had no idea how long he remained that way, but he jerked upright at the sound of the door slamming back against the wall. Haines took two steps into the room and snapped, "Get out here, now."

Castle breathed deeply two, three, four times, pushed himself off the couch, and followed.

Jenkins was standing in the middle of the cluster of detectives, the two others from the 21st and Karapowski beside him. "We found a connection. I think. It's something, at least."

He looked around. Everyone stared silently. He continued. "It's Marisa Harrington's friend, Jean Hartley, the girl who discovered her body. She was a biological daughter in Tyson's first foster family; he was only there for a few weeks before they discovered him in the basement with her, smoking weed, and he was out of the house that afternoon. Hartley obviously hadn't connected the event to her friend's murder, but we were desperate enough to start running extensive backgrounds on Harrington's friends after doing her family, and this popped. Years after Tyson left, Hartley and Harrington attended York Prep together; they were seniors when Angela Branson was a freshman."

"So he's fixated on Hartley?" Esposito asked. "Because it sure doesn't seem that way."

Jenkins expelled a short breath, frustrated. "I didn't _say _that. Maybe he kept tabs on Hartley over the years. Maybe he'd met Harrington long ago, through her." He gave a sharp shrug. "I don't know."

Montgomery tapped his fingers. "Could be a coincidence," he said, and several heads bobbed in agreement.

"There are no coincidences," Castle snapped.

"It's all we have," Jenkins said.

"Can this _help _us?" Ryan asked.

"Hartley was wealthy," Esposito said. "I only talked to them once, but her parents seemed like good people. Her home would have been one of the better foster homes – one of the best, even."

"Tyson's next home wasn't," Montgomery guessed.

"No," Castle said with a sudden, stone-cold certainty that stemmed from hours of reading and rereading Tyson's files. "His life pivots on that moment – stay with the Hartleys and maybe he could have overcome his crappy childhood; leave the Hartleys, start shifting from bad foster home to bad foster home, and he had no chance. This case - it's different, with Beckett, it's special, and he would have brought her someplace special. He would have brought her to a pivot point."

Everyone stilled for a beat. "Where?" Montgomery asked.

"They lived in Kingsbridge, near Ewen Park," Jenkins said.

"Get me the current owners. I want a car up there ten minutes ago."

"Let's go," Esposito said, motioning to Ryan. "Castle, you're with us."

Haines, Garabaldi, Karapowski, and Jenkins all immediately fell into step behind them. Esposito eyed them all for a quarter second before snapping "fine" and letting them jog behind.

Esposito angled at Castle in the elevator. "It's probably nothing," he said.

"I know," Castle responded.

"There's almost no chance that this will give us anything helpful."

"I know."

"You can't hope for too much."

"I know."

"You're hoping anyway."

Castle swallowed, clenched his jaw. "Of course."

Esposito shifted awkwardly. "Me too."

* * *

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Okay, we're going to have to go ahead and hope that this wasn't a gigantic fail in the land of I'mMyOwnBetaVille – I'm at about four hours of sleep total for the past two nights due to (1) New Years Revelries (Happy 2011, everyone!) and (2) a red eye flight. So, um, if you notice weird and wonky things going on in that story up there, you can just gently point them out (maybe while giving me a condescending electronic pat on the head) and I will try and, I don't know, fix them.

And even though it has moved from the Season of Happiness and Love and Joy and Holidays to the Endless January of Despair (well, it has in America; all you Southern Hemisphere readers can just go frolic in the sun or something), do not fear, because all of your reviews STILL carry the Torch of Eternal Cheerful Elven Christmas for me (except when they are screaming at me because of all the Trauma).


	13. Chapter 13

The feeling of Tyson's hands, clamped around her ribs as he dragged her through the dim room, sharpened her awareness. Her brain stumbled through a scenario in which she swung her legs around to cut his out from under him, but her arms were still tied behind her back, she was shivering violently from the cold, she'd only made it halfway back to consciousness, and she could feel, in the vibrating tension of Tyson's hands, that he was waiting for her to make a move. Every instinct in her awakening brain screamed for her to fight, but she forced herself to wait, forced herself to close her eyes and to go limp as he dragged her. After he guided her loose limbs into the chair she noted that he relaxed a little, only slipping her bound arms over the chair's back, not bothering to secure them to a rung. He moved in front of her with some coarse rope and began tying her calves to the rough wooden legs. _Not yet not yet not yet_, she told herself, breathing deeply, still dragging herself back to total consciousness. As he wound the rope around her ankles, she twisted her legs a bit, bowing her calves out just slightly, disguising it as a shiver. She cracked her eyes a sliver and saw that he was staring up at her, paying more attention to her face than to the rope around her feet. She let another dramatic shiver ripple down her hips and through her calves, and then another. In the end, she bought herself about a quarter-inch slack in each rope. A quarter inch was enough. Maybe.

Tyson squatted in front of her and hooked his index finger under her chin. "You awake now, sweetheart?" he asked, gently.

She blinked blearily. His tone had changed.

"We're sending a picture of you over to your friends, and I'm going to need you to stay with me." He ran a thumb slowly along her jawbone. She wanted to crawl back into the freezing shower, to ice away the feeling of his fingers on her skin.

_You want me to smile_, she almost snapped, but the change in Tyson since her reluctant dye job was impossible to miss – he was softer, gentler; she could see the side of him that so carefully laid out the women he killed after he had strangled them. She knew she shouldn't escalate, knew she shouldn't push him back to anger (he was slower, more methodical, in his current mood, and she needed, more than anything else, time). Even so, she couldn't stop herself from glaring as he aimed her own phone at her and tapped out a quick text.

He walked back over and stared at her silently, eerily, his smug smirk conspicuously absent. Reaching down, he ran a hand through her soaking hair. She looked up at him quietly, breathing deeply, trying to play up her serenity or innocence or whatever the hell he saw that made him so much more careful with her.

"Soon," he whispered, reaching down and giving her shoulder a soft squeeze before he pivoted, walked into the bathroom, and closed the door.

"Stupid bastard," she hissed to herself, the words grounding her, anchoring her to consciousness as she tried to cast off the horrible, heavy sense of unease she'd felt as he'd stared at her.

She pulled both legs up and felt the rope bite into them, the pain sharper than she expected. She rotated her calves outward, feeling the sting deep in her anklebones, but she kept tugging and twisting, sawing up, down, right, left, again and again. She felt a trickle of blood thread its way down her heel. Gritting her teeth, she continued to twist, her mind drifting away from the pain to a conversation she'd had with Castle months ago.

"_It's twelve twenty-three in the morning, Beckett," Castle had said as he walked up to her desk, thrusting a bottle at her and preemptively stating his argument. "I cleared post-midnight celebratory Guinness with Montgomery _ages _ago."_

_It was a sign of how hard the case had been that she took a small sip before turning back to her paperwork. "Don't you have a child? And a girlfriend?"_

_He winced. "Nikki's calling me, actually. I'd put her in a fairly compromising position right before this case started, and I haven't had time to extricate her yet."_

_She put down her pen and turned toward him, narrowing her eyes slightly. "Actually. That reminds me."_

_He gulped._

"_Right before our dear friend Mr. Haines was killed, I finished a very interesting read."_

_He brightened a little. "Did you like it? Was it masterful?"_

_She smiled despite herself. "Very artful, even if it was obviously fiction. But I couldn't help but notice –"_

"_The incredibly hot sex scenes? Did it make you wonder where you might find that kind of chemistry in your own life?"_

_She glared. "Your penchant for putting Nikki in sticky situations. What, first you have some psycho attack her when she's _naked_, then you have her tied to a chair and seconds away from involuntary ear surgery." She cocked her head. "Do you secretly have something against her, Castle?"_

_He paused for a moment, considering more seriously than she'd thought he might. "Well, I have to build the drama, obviously." He arched an eyebrow. "As one of my many fans, you should know all about how carefully – and successfully - I create suspense." _

_Beckett huffed, unsure of why she was irritated. "It's just – you do so well with the little details, and then you go and create these situations –" She broke off, frustrated by her uncharacteristic lack of ability to communicate, wishing she hadn't said anything. "Do you honestly think it's realistic that she could get out of that? Don't you think that sometimes you make her a little too unreal – a little too ideal?" _

Tyson stepped out of the bathroom, a green and white rope hanging from his left hand. _Don't look_, she thought, suddenly realizing that both of her feet were slick with blood from her frantic twisting. But Tyson kept his eyes locked with hers.

Her right heel popped up and above the rope.

Keeping her upper body stone-still, she wriggled her left leg.

Tyson moved with purpose, walking up behind her, stretching the rope across her neck.

_("Well, Beckett, it _is_ fiction," was the response she expected, was the response that immediately played through her own mind, but Castle had sat and looked at her for a long time before responding.) "I guess," he had said, staring the way he did when he was looking into her rather than at her, "I guess Nikki Heat has some aspects of her that are ideal. But I think she can handle that, just like she can handle getting knocked around a little. She doesn't – she really doesn't deserve everything that's been handed to her, but it – I wouldn't put her in a situation she couldn't get out of."_

She could feel the heat of Tyson's breath on the back of her neck.

The green and white nylon bit into her jugular. The air stagnated in her lungs.

Her left heel slipped free.

She toed the rope off her ankles and planted her feet on the floor.

She knew, objectively, she had no chance. The drugs were still making her sluggish, her head was spinning from her concussion, she was already hazing out from lack of oxygen, her hands were bound behind her back.

"_But then again," Castle had said, "She's tougher than most people think is possible. She's a little bit miraculous that way." He'd shrugged, obviously feigning nonchalance. "I think it's one of the reasons so many people love her."_

She flung her torso forward, letting the cord saw into her throat, and then rocketed back, aiming her aching head for where she hoped Tyson's already-broken nose would be as she thought of Nikki Heat, as she thought of Castle.

* * *

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Okay, so first off I owe a gigantic I'M SORRY to the people to whom, last week, I may or may not have said, "YES, the next post will most definitively be up this week! I am back in the Land of Gloom and Doom and who knows there will probably be like FIFTEEN MORE CHAPTERS posted in the next THREE DAYS!" Because I am obviously a huge liar. But in my defense, I had it all planned out that I would just fix some stuff up and post this chapter on Wednesday and the elves would be cheering and everyone would start clapping and maybe shooting confetti or something equally festive. But then we learned that Very Important People were to bestoweth their presence unto my Place of Employ on Friday, so instead it was all Fifteen Hour Days of Doom. And then, okay, so Friday Happy Hour was really Friday Happy Forty-Eight Hours, because, well, Fifteen Hour Days of Doom are really hard, and here we are. Am I oversharing? I am. I'm oversharing.

Oh, I am also sorry that I apparently can write only cliffhangers now. Your cheery happy Christmas-song-singing reviews really do make me write faster I swear (your threatening vitriolic pointy-pitchfork-carrying reviews also make me make me write faster because they TERRIFY me) and you have all been so wonderfully awesome and I will try and be quick I promise.


	14. Chapter 14

By the time the group stood glumly outside a plywood-covered doorframe, they knew that the home where Tyson had spent several weeks as a foster child had been owned by Wachovia for the past two years. As Esposito had driven north at a definitively reckless speed, Jones had explained, his voice echoing out of Ryan's speakerphone, that the small section of Kingsbridge to which they were driving had declined sharply in the mid '90s as a result of the crack epidemic, that swathes of the once-affluent street were now uninhabited and almost wholly unsalable.

"Well," said Ryan, scuffing his foot along the cement porch of the ugly row house, "still can't hurt to have a look."

Karapowski regarded the door critically. "Pry or kick?" she asked, motioning at frame.

A dim crash suddenly echoed up from the basement.

"In, now," Esposito snapped, drawing his gun and ramming his shoulder into the plywood. Instead of splintering, the wood fell to the floor as the nails slid out easily – someone had carefully pried the boards out earlier before replacing them. Haines, Garabaldi, Karapowski, and Jenkins fanned out behind Ryan and Esposito as they flowed rapidly across the dark, dusty living room to a shadowy staircase. Castle had wedged himself in behind Ryan as they'd slipped through the doorway. He steadfastly ignored Garabaldi's urgent taps on his shoulder.

"Will you _get back_?" Haines finally hissed at him as they hit the top of the stairs.

"Sorry, can't hear you," Castle whispered, crowding up even closer to Ryan.

He heard a thud and a pained, raw voice. Tyson's voice, maybe.

Ryan and Esposito took the steps three at a time and Castle was just behind them, hurtling precariously down the staircase.

They burst through the unlocked door at the bottom of the stairwell and into a dark room.

_Thank you thank you thank you Jesus fucking Christ _was his sole coherent thought for several seconds, because his brain first processed Beckett's form and she was standing in the doorway to a bathroom, her chest heaving, her lip swollen, her cheek bleeding, her hair blonde, but brilliantly, vibrantly alive.

Of course, the next thing he noticed was the glint of a knife against her neck and Tyson behind her, blood from his nose dripping onto her shoulder, his eyes flashing angrily.

"Put down the knife," Esposito yelled, and Ryan echoed it and then so did the rest of the team in a discordant chorus as six weapons dipped up and down in an attempt to get a lock on Tyson's head. Castle could tell already – they'd never get a safe shot with Beckett in front of him like that.

He looked her over more thoroughly – there were the obvious injuries on her face, her feet were covered in blood, her hands were clearly tied tightly behind her, a thin, red welt was starting to rise on her neck (Castle felt his stomach clench), but her eyes locked silently with his and they were aware enough, sharp enough, and the combination of relief at finding her alive and worry about what still could happen made his knees shake and his chest vibrate.

Tyson laughed sharply. "You think I'm intimidated by you?"

"Six guns against one knife. Those are some seriously shitty odds," Esposito said.

"Next thing you're gonna do is try to convince me it'll be easier for me if I come quietly," Tyson said.

"Well," Esposito said.

"Do _not _treat me like an idiot," Tyson snapped, angling the knife and pressing down ever so slightly, creating a shallow scratch just to the left of Beckett's esophagus. A thin line of blood appeared. "I know an advantage when I have one."

Castle could see her jaw clench as she let one slow, controlled breath out through her nose. His throat constricted, making him gulp for air for a short second. _Focus focus,_ he told himself, looking over her shoulder at Tyson.

"Hey, Jerry," he said, his attempt at sounding jovial falling more flat than usual. "How much of that –" he gestured at Tyson's face, at his bloody nose and at his left eye, swelling more and more by the minute – "did Beckett do to you with her hands tied behind her back?"

The asshole had the nerve to grin. "How many times can you underestimate the same person, am I right? Things _could not be _more fucked up right now because of her."

"I'm a little offended. We don't get any credit for finding you?" Castle spoke without thinking; he only knew that if he could keep Tyson talking, maybe he could keep the knife blade from digging into Beckett's neck. Ryan had edged back a little, letting Castle step out from behind him, and the rest of the cops hung back and remained silent, perhaps sensing that Castle had a more intuitive understanding of Tyson than they could hope to.

Tyson shrugged. "You would have been too late if she hadn't managed to wrench that rope off her pretty ankles."

Castle swallowed, sucked in a breath, tried to get rid of that particular image.

"Not my fault that even doped up on sedatives I'm faster than you," Beckett said, her voice coming out in a low, scratchy whisper that nonetheless carried a little too effectively.

"Do you think maybe you could keep your fucking mouth _shut _for once," Tyson snapped, pressing the knife more firmly against her throat so that she had to lean her head back and back until her body was inverted into a sharp arch and her cheek was brushing against his and her blonde hair was draped over his shoulder and down his back.

Castle could hear Ryan's harsh exhalation of protest, but except for that the entire room was silent, still for two, three, four of his too-fast heartbeats. On the fifth heartbeat the room unfroze and he found himself taking two desperate steps toward the pair, his fingers trembling with the need to do something, anything. "Jesus, Tyson, calm the hell down," he snapped before turning his attention to the woman bent back at his shoulder. Her eyes were closed. "Kate, Kate, you okay?"

"Fine," she grit out in her hoarse whisper.

Tyson twisted his free hand in her hair and, pulling roughly, bent her slightly further back. "Did I not just say shut _up_," he growled.

"What do you want?" Castle asked, his voice coming out far louder than he'd intended. Esposito, who'd come up behind him, gave his shoulder a reproachful bump. He took a breath, centered and steadied himself. "You can't want to slit her throat – that's not your M.O. That won't be fun for you."

"Like hell it won't," Tyson snapped.

"Not like it could be, and you know that. I think right now, you want to get out of here, and I think you're in luck, because as you so astutely observed earlier, you have a hell of a powerful bargaining chip. So just tell me what you want, Tyson. Just _tell me_."

"What if you can't give me anything I want?" Tyson asked. Castle could see the man slowly regaining control of his anger.

Castle shrugged helplessly, almost vibrating with the intense need to _do _something. "Do you want me to tell you that you have the power? Do you want me to tell you that you have control? That I'll do whatever you want?"

"Take it back a notch, Castle," he heard Esposito's voice growling in his left ear.

With the hand still fisted in her hair, Tyson pulled back a little more, until Castle could hear the pained, hoarse reverberation of protest from deep in her throat. He couldn't help it: his shoulders bunched, his legs tensed, a shudder wracked his body.

"Okay," Esposito said, "Why don't we all j –"

The knife angled down again and created another shallow scratch on her throat. Esposito stopped in the middle of a word. "I'm really not interested in comments from the peanut gallery," Tyson said.

"Then tell us what you _are _interested in," Castle hissed, frustration and fear and anger constricting his chest, tunneling his vision. Beckett's head was tipped so far back that he could only see her chin and her throat (her throat that was encircled by an ever-darkening welt from Tyson's rope, her throat that had two small, slightly bloody slashes from Tyson's knife), and he was feeling more trapped and desperate with every passing second.

"Well," Tyson said, smiling, "I'm most interested in running this knife slowly along Detective Beckett's throat and then having you watch as she gasps for breath and dies."

He shifted his arm a little, possibly to get a good look at Castle's blanched face, and suddenly Beckett, who had been arched passively against him, sprang to life. He could see her shoulders tense (he guessed, from the sudden change in Tyson's expression, that she'd punched or grabbed somewhere very sensitive) as she drove a bare heel into his instep. Tyson started to curl forward instinctively, and she used that moment to hurl herself out of the way, her throat passing a whisper away from the edge of the knife.

Tyson was already turning to her, but a crack rippled through the room, shortly followed by a clatter as the knife fell to the floor. Blood immediately started flowing from a bullet hole in Tyson's shoulder. Esposito and Ryan, the two closest to him, each had one of his arms two heartbeats later. Castle heard the thump of his body hitting the wall and then one dull thud of flesh on flesh ("Hey, Esposito, you already shot him, can you try not to kill him so we can get the satisfaction of a trial?" he heard Karapowski ask), but he had turned to the corner of the room, where Beckett had thrown herself onto the floor. Already she had managed to push herself into a sitting position, and she was shakily starting to bunch her legs to stand.

"Christ, Beckett, hang on. What are you thinking?" he snapped, his voice trembling as he walked the two feet over to her and dropped to the floor.

"I'm fine, Castle," she said, but her voice was still crackling and she was looking somewhere in the vicinity of his chest.

"Kate –" he started, breaking off as his throat tightened inexplicably.

"Can you untie my hands?" He dipped his chin to look directly at her face. She wouldn't make eye contact.

"Right. Of course." He scooted behind her, wedging himself between her back and the corner of the room, staring at the coarse rope that was wound around her wrists. He caught snippets of the surrounding conversations through the ringing in his ears as his fingers fumbled with the rope – _It's not police brutality, asshole, I'm positive that Detective Beckett cracked your jaw before we ever got here – When the hell's the bus getting here? – Yeah, I'm calling Montgomery now – Better have Haines and Garabaldi watch him, God only knows what the other two'll do to him - No, it's okay, Castle's got her _– but the knot was tight and his fingers felt thick and clumsy. "I can't –" he forced past the lump in his throat, feeling like the worst kind of useless.

"Just use the knife," she murmured, nodding her head toward the flash of metal lying a foot away from him. He numbly reached over and picked it up before he realized that it was Tyson's knife (of course it was, what other knife would be lying there on the floor?) and the slight glinting red along the blade was the blood from Beckett's neck.

He almost dropped it; his hand was shaking so badly that he wasn't sure how he kept his grip. "I don't think," he whispered, "I can't. I'm going to cut you." _And your blood, your blood is already on this knife; I'm holding a knife that's shining with blood from your throat. _

"You're not gonna cut me, Castle," she said in a tired whisper.

He brought his shaking hand up and managed to clumsily saw through a strand of the thick rope with the knife. He heard her soft intake of breath as he pressed down and the bonds pulled against her wrists, then the rope gave, loosening suddenly. He dropped the knife, using a foot to push it away, towards the bathroom, as he numbly pulled the rope off of her hands, revealing chafed wrists and a hideous purple bruise on her lower right forearm. The tips of his fingers brushed against her clammy skin. _She's okay it's okay_, he told himself, but his eyes were stinging and his vision blurred.

She scooted herself gingerly around so that she was facing him. "Don't be silly," she crackled, as if he could be any more embarrassed.

"Allergies," he snuffled, waving a wrist around the room. "Damn dusty basements and all. Are you okay?"

"Yes," she said, finally looking into his inexplicably moist eyes. He blinked rapidly. She glanced to the side, moved her hand up to briefly cup the bottom of his jaw. Her palm was freezing cold and vibrating slightly. He tilted his head into it and sucked in a huge breath. "I'm here, okay?" she murmured, slowly dragging her fingers off his jaw before dropping her hand down onto his thigh.

"I'm so sorry," he whispered, feeling his throat tightening even more as he glanced over her – her bloody feet, her chafed wrists, her swollen lip, cut cheek, blonde hair, her welted, scratched throat.

"Right," she said, forcing a tiny smile that he was almost certain was to cover up a wince (he could still see; did she think he was dense just because he had an unexpected allergy attack?). "Next time could you not steal my thunder? I had the situation totally under control."

"Obviously," Castle said, reaching his hand down to lace his fingers through hers.

"Hey, guys, EMTs are six minutes out," Ryan called across the room.

"We're glad you're not dead, Beckett," Esposito added.

"You're sweet," she called back hoarsely. She turned back around, tilting forward toward Castle. He blinked even more frenetically. "Are _you _okay?"

_You don't get to ask that question right now_, he wanted to tell her, but the lump in his throat had gotten worse and worse until all he could do was bob his head up and down, blinking, feeling like some kind of ridiculous moron (Beckett was sitting next to him, her eyes dry, regarding him sympathetically_, sympathetically_, and when, hours earlier, he'd envisioned bursting into the room and shooting Tyson in the face and gathering a pliable and grateful Beckett into his arms he'd apparently forgotten that she was some kind of superhuman badass and he was some kind of pathetic _loser_). The horrible tension that had sung through his bones and sinews and tendons kept releasing, the knot in his chest uncurling, but the relief was too strong; it physically hurt as it washed through him. He choked back a sob.

"Don't," she said, moving their laced hands together up against her chest. "It's just releasing adrenaline."

"Don't _you_ have adrenaline?" Castle asked, a smothered laugh escaping as he used his free hand to swipe at his wet cheeks.

"Tell you what," Beckett said, pressing his knuckles hard into her sternum (his hands too hot and her skin too cold and it wasn't enough; he wanted to fold his body into hers until he could get control of his tightened throat and trembling hands) before untangling her fingers from his, "if you help me up right now I won't mention to anyone how you cried like a girl_._"

"Beckett," he said, warily looking at her through blurry eyes.

"I'm fine. I'm walking out of here," she said, her voice leaving absolutely no question as to whether that would happen as she shuffled stiffly onto her knees.

_You _aren't _fine_, he almost snapped, but he stopped short at the sudden look in her eyes.

"Please, Castle," she murmured, the roughness of her voice different from the hoarseness that came from being strangled halfway to death. "I don't want to fight right now."

"Okay," he said, steadying his breathing, "Whatever you need. I'm here."

* * *

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Hey! What happened up there? You are all very welcome because (a) look BECKETT IS SAVED and NOT DEAD (b) NO cliffhanger! You may praise me accordingly.

Also, if you desire you may take this quick survey (PSA: notes leading up to survey do not really align with anyone's definition of "quick"). I very rarely ask for little singing elf input, because most of the time I am like, "It is my story and I will do what I want, b****!" because that is just how hard I go (if it helps you can picture me typing away with my feet up on a desk while drinking vodka and listening to some ridiculous rap music like Kanye West's "Power" and evilly stroking the fat bunny sitting in my lap and occasionally cackling a little, because even though that particular scenario has happened max two times – okay, three times maybe - I think it really does illustrate something about my inner being). BUT the time has come for Input, my lilliputian friends! Read on…

So, when I started this puppy, I envisioned something that went on for quite a bit after this particular point, but I had also envisioned something slightly less case-y and quasi-episodic than this wound up becoming (kind of snuck up on me there). And I feel, from my many years of X-Files viewing, that at this point in a television show we'd have one more small-to-decent-sized epilogue-type scene and that would be that. And now I'm considering my plans for writing more and thinking about how after another scene everything would change in rhythm and pacing and plot and, well, basically, EVERYTHING would change, and would that not kind of make it a semi-incoherent piece of writing, and it's just made me wishy-washy about MY ENTIRE BEING. So, Elflets, this is your time to shine! Pick a number (or create your own option!):

(1) This was a good, nice ending. Full stop.

(2) It would kind of alter this fic's tone and be a little odd if you just kept rambling on and on (as you are wont to do) after they'd freaking captured Tyson already. An epilogue chapter is plenty, and you could write a sequel if you wanted.

(3) I don't really think it would screw anything up too badly if you kept it going for a handful more chapters. I mean, hi, it's _fanfic_, you bimbo, not James Joyce (and like he was coherent anyway). Calm down.

(4) I DON'T CARE I JUST WANT MOAAARRRR STORYYYYYYYY WHERE IS MOAAAAARRRRRR STORYYYYYY.

(P.S. WTF _happened_ here, author's note? I am sorry about the excessive excessiveness contained above; I swear this is the worst it will ever be).

(P.P.S. IS IT JANUARY 24th YET? I AM DYING!)


	15. Chapter 15

**TWO**

* * *

The overeager EMTs, Beckett decided, had absolutely no idea what was good for them.

"No," she said for the ninth or tenth time. She'd gotten a little more acerbic each time she'd had to say it, and by now, her new friends Jonathan and Matt both seemed to be equal parts frustrated and terrified.

"The hospital is the only place –" Jonathan continued gamely, but, thank God, Castle chose that moment to rocket into view.

"Got it!" the writer announced as he crowded up to the open back door of the ambulance, holding a Styrofoam cup aloft triumphantly.

"Is that _coffee_?" Matt asked.

"What do you have against caffeine?" Castle responded, scrunching his forehead in a way that could only be described as affronted.

"She has a _concussion_," Jonathan said. "She can't have _that_."

"Oh," Castle said, deflating. "A bad concussion?"

Matt and Jonathan both turned and looked at Beckett. She waved her unsplinted wrist at them.

"Just give him the rundown. God knows he'll find out anyway."

Jonathan hopped out of the back of the ambulance and stood next to Castle. "Minor lacerations on the throat, cheek, and wrists, major ones on the back – the two deepest on the back would do well with a couple stitches but will be okay without. Extremely severe abrasions that resulted in open wounds on both ankles; moderate abrasions on both wrists and on the throat. Compression of the larynx will make her hoarse for twenty-four to forty-eight hours, but there's very little danger of further swelling. Very minor sprain of the right ankle. Major contusions on the left hip, right wrist, and both biceps. Right wrist has a bad sprain that really should be x-rayed to ensure it's not a fracture. Concussion that's Grade II or III and could probably use a CAT scan. Unknown drugs in system; it would be great to run a blood panel. Oh, and we highly recommend a rape kit, since loss of consciousness occurred for an unknown period of time during the abduction." Jonathan, Beckett decided, noting his flushed cheeks and rapid speech, was not very happy with her right now.

As the EMT spoke, Castle lost the color that had only just returned to his cheeks. He'd been heartbreakingly, frustratingly worried about her, and while she couldn't say she wasn't flattered that he'd been close to sobbing over her in the basement, the hovering had gotten oppressive by the time they were walking up the stairs (damn near stair one, in fact, when he kept almost tripping over his own feet as he tried to stay as close to her as possible). They'd emerged from the building to the sight of the ambulance squealing to a stop, and approximately three seconds later, Jonathan and Matt's _Get Beckett to the Hospital _campaign had begun in full force. Somehow, she'd managed to persuade them to check her out in the back of the ambulance as she convinced Castle that she wouldn't make it through the next ten minutes without his fetching her a cup of coffee (her head was spinning and she couldn't stomach the thought of drinking it, but his hovering closeness pressed in on her, made her throat constrict, and she'd already had enough trouble breathing for one day).

"Beckett," Castle said, his voice cracking as he took a step toward her.

"If you start to cry again so help me," Beckett said, hurting and tired and cranky and wishing, more than anything, that Castle would stop staring at her like he was so achingly happy just to be looking at her and simultaneously so frantically worried that she would suddenly disappear.

He flinched. She turned to Matt, who, of the three men in front of her (five, if you counted Ryan and Esposito hovering awkwardly at an appropriate distance), seemed like the most pliable and like the least concerned that she would suddenly drop dead. "Thanks for everything," she said firmly.

The medic sighed. "Ice the wrist over the splint, and if it doesn't start to feel better soon, go to an orthopedist. Ice the head; sleep is good but to be on the safe side someone –" he tilted slightly to include Castle in their conversation – "should wake you up every hour to check for uneven pupil dilation, slurred speech, excessive pain, anything else out of the ordinary. If your throat feels more swollen or if you have any difficulty breathing at all, get to an ER." He shifted uncomfortably and glanced toward the other EMT.

"That's all completely unofficial," Jonathan huffed. "Officially, get yourself to a hospital. Now."

"Duly noted," Beckett said as she stiffly clambered down onto the street next to Castle. She could feel the medics' eyes on her for several seconds before they climbed into the ambulance and pulled away.

Castle and Ryan and Esposito were watching her with varying levels of frustration. "So," she said, going for cheery but mostly managing _not dead yet_, "who wants to drive me home?"

The three men glanced at each other. She watched Castle visibly gather himself, breathing deeply and plastering a strained smile on his face. "Who's excited for a sleepover?"

Esposito jumped on it before she could get a word in edgewise. "You need someone to wake you up every hour."

Ryan continued, "And I'm not sure how much you remember about the state you left your apartment in, but I think even sleeping at Castle's is preferable to that."

"Hey," Castle said, reproachful but distracted, his eyes glued to her face. She tried not to grimace as she thought of her apartment – she hadn't forgotten the struggle there, not exactly, not when her back and wrist and ankle still ached so badly, but it had seemed far away, remote, another world that didn't fit with her conception of her tidy, if dreary, sublet.

"I need to change," she said. She was still in the leggings and tank top that she'd slept in the night before, now accessorized with a pair of men's dress socks that flopped two inches off her toes (somehow, in that horrible basement, Castle had managed to help her to her feet as he simultaneously removed his shoes and slipped off his socks, and as soon as he'd been sure she wouldn't fall over he had knelt in front of her and gently tugged the socks onto her feet) and a too-large jacket that smelled vaguely of Castle's sandalwood aftershave.

"You can borrow Alexis' clothes," Castle said helpfully. "It'll be close enough."

"I want my own clothes."

"We'll get someone to pick them up for you," Ryan responded brightly.

"I can get them myself," she responded, praying that she sounded like a steely detective and not like a petulant child.

"You'll come with me, after?" Castle asked. She wondered if his goal was to sound so despondent that she'd feel too badly to deny him.

"Yes, fine." She turned to Ryan and Esposito. "Can you drop us off at my apartment?"

They bobbed their heads silently and simultaneously.

"You're sure you don't want to rest?" Castle queried in a worried whisper.

Every inch of her ached, and every time she moved stars burst at the corners of her eyes, but she was sure, more than anything, that rest was the last thing she wanted. "What I want is to pretend that none of this happened," she said firmly, aware of how ridiculous that sounded with her head still pounding and her voice still hoarse, with her body still bundled up in Castle's socks and jacket.

Castle shuffled her into the front of the car and she was too tired to argue, curling up and fading into a drowsy half-consciousness as soon as they rolled onto the potholed street. She jerked, hard, when the car came to a stop outside her apartment – most of the way to oblivion, she'd felt that she was falling, plummeting, and she'd kicked out to catch herself and found only air beneath her feet. Her head protested savagely at the sudden motion, but she still managed to bite back all but the first hint of a muffled moan.

Esposito turned to her from the driver's seat - of course he'd caught it. "Sure we can't just bring you right to Castle's? Or, ideally, a doctor?"

"I'm fine."

He sighed, turned back toward Castle. "Want us to come up with you?"

"No," Beckett snapped before Castle could get half a word out in response. She tilted back toward him. "Let's _go_."

She dragged herself out of the car and moved toward her entrance, but something in Ryan's eyes caught her as he clambered out of the back seat in front of Castle. She dredged up the energy from somewhere deep within her. "I'm sorry," she said, wishing her words would stop coming out sounding like they'd been scraped over sandpaper. "Really, thank you."

"Well," Ryan said, shifting uncomfortably, "You kicked some serious ass."

"See you at the Precinct on Monday?"

Ryan literally hopped from foot to foot, as though the sidewalk was suddenly coated with molten lava. "Um," he said.

Esposito, still sitting in the driver's seat, leaned over and rescued him. "When you're cleared, anyway. But we have to swing by and get a statement from you tomorrow morning."

Beckett sighed, nodded. They were already seriously breaking protocol by waiting so long; she was sure they would have to play up her concussion in the report so they wouldn't get slammed for improper procedure. Ryan had been great about it, though, only asking once before he dropped it ("Statement?" he'd queried as Jonathan wrapped the splint around her tender wrist, right after Castle had sprinted in the direction of a coffee shop he'd just located on his iPhone, and she'd shook her head once, sharply, and said, "Later," and that had been that).

Her head swam as she ducked under the crime tape strung across her door. She could feel Castle's eyes on her, so she forced herself not to pause, to ignore the glass shards littering the floor, the upturned armchair, the shredded sofa, the broken television. She started moving toward the bedroom, but Castle's hand, firm on her shoulder, stopped her. He knelt, grabbing a short pair of boots that sat next to the door, and carefully zipped them onto her feet. Glass crunched softly under her feet as she walked toward the bedroom, Castle just inches behind her.

The bedroom was worse than the living room - not more destroyed, necessarily, but the damage felt more personal, more invasive. She felt Castle's eyes on her as he stood in the doorway and watched her throw some clothes into a duffle. She wondered idly how she'd ever be able to sleep again.

Yanking some jeans out of the closet a little too savagely sent her head into a tailspin. She stumbled two steps back and sat, hard, on the rumpled bed; Castle was squatting in front of her two breaths later, radiating anxiety. He started to open his mouth to say something, _Take it easy, Kate_, or, _We're going to the doctor now, Beckett_, and she didn't want to hear it and all she could think of was the last time she was in this bed and she woke to the feeling of Tyson pressing down on her and the slow burn of the Ketamine in her hip and the only way she could think to silence both Castle and the memories was to fold herself forward and crash her lips into his.

His mouth opened reflexively as she scraped her teeth along his lower lip and then jostled her tongue into his mouth. She felt unanchored from reality, spinning with pain and dizziness, want bursting and fizzling through her aching body. Castle kept dipping back slightly, and she could feel the goddamn maddening reasonableness in the soft, restrained way he moved his lips against hers. She growled, low, in the back of her throat and pressed in more, crowding at him until he made a little noise, a moan maybe, and pressed back, his tongue flicking out into her mouth, his fingers digging into the bed directly on either side of her hips. She'd gotten her palms halfway up his shirt, smoothing over the bottom of his chest, before he finally managed to circle his hands loosely around her bandaged wrists and pull himself away from her.

"God, Beckett," he whispered, grabbing her left hand in both of his and pressing it briefly against his mouth before laying his arms in her lap, "I know I'm irresistible, but what're you doing to me here?"

She shrugged, looked to the side. "You didn't seem to mind the last time."

For a moment, she couldn't tell whether he was going to laugh or scream, and she wondered, in a disjointed way, if she usually inspired the same kind of confusion in him. He finally went with a sad smile, leaning in and brushing his fingertips along her cheekbone. "It's just been a really rough day on both of us. Can we take it easy?"

_Can we take it easy on you_ is what she knew he meant, and it made her coil with frustration. "I'm not some sort of _victim_, Castle," she snapped. He rocked back onto his heels, a look of intense sympathy and understanding flashing across his eyes.

"Look. Kate –"

She cut him off. "I'm going to shower and change, and then we can get out of here."

He closed his eyes, breathed deeply two, three times. "I can't keep doing this, Beckett," he rasped. "Please stop making me fight you."

She glanced down at his hands, turned palms up on the thin fabric of her tights, and she thought back to when he was kneeling in front of her in the basement, tears streaming down his face. "I can still feel his fingers," she murmured, hoping this small piece of truth could serve as her apology, could help him understand. "On my jaw. In my hair. I just – I just want a damn shower, Castle."

He stayed on his heels, frozen for an instant, before pushing himself up and leaning forward until his forehead was a whisper away from hers. Even though she'd just had her hands pressed against his chest and her tongue in his mouth, it was too much, too close when he was looking at her with such trembling intensity. "I'm not going to ask, because you won't listen to me," he said gruffly. "Change your clothes. The second we get to the loft I will turn on the shower myself. Neither of us needs to stay here with this place the way it is right now."

She sighed, looked away. "This place is my home, Castle."

"Is it?" he choked out, voice thick. She just stared. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes briefly. "I know you think I'm being ridiculous and overprotective. But I didn't drag you straight to the hospital, like I wanted to; I let you come here, even though I thought it was a horrible idea; I'm agreeing that it's okay for you to shower, even though right now all you need is rest – and you can't, you can't ask me to sit in this apartment like everything is normal and wait for you to finish your shower, because I can't do it, Beckett."

Her skin was still crawling, but if she kept arguing for a shower, Castle would go on and on about a therapist later, she could feel it.

She twisted her fingers around her jeans, which had fallen, crumpled, on the bed when she had occupied her hands with Castle's chest. "You win," she breathed, feeling weightless, feeling empty.

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**1) **So it turns out there is a REASON I don't do polls, and that is because you are all really indecisive. If you're curious, the tallies, allowing for one person to vote for multiple things (because you all kind of did it, you gigantic cheaters), was 2 for _Chapter 14 was a nice ending_; 27 for _Maybe an epilogue or a couple of chapters and then a sequel_; 28 for _Just keep writing, crazy bimbo_, and 25 for _I am crazy person and could you hurry yourself along please? _(Yes. I counted. Because I LOVE YOU and I CARE ABOUT YOUR OPINIONS. And also I am OCD.) The final decision is as such: I'm keeping it as one story for now, but this chapter was the beginning of what I am thinking of as Part Two, and there's a pretty significant tone shift between Parts One and Two. So if you thought the story should have been over at Chapter 14, then you should probably just stop reading, otherwise, just kind of, you know, remember that this is Part Two, and if you feel like everything's getting all kinds of wonky you can always just tell me and I can take the story, a .22, and backhoe out back to my garden.

**2) I haz teh biggest sorriez **for those of you who had to wait so much longer than that to which you are accustomed for an update!

**3) **Your reviews are still and will forever be happy singing Christmas elves to me. Y'all light up my life a little bit.


	16. Chapter 16

"Dad!"

Alexis' voice finally broke through the fog. He had no idea how long he'd been staring vaguely into space, aware of only his exhaustion and relief and the shadow of panic still hanging over him. Time hadn't been linear since he'd first stepped into her ruined apartment; the minutes expanded and contracted, his world stilling and quieting and then jerking forward in great rushes (surely Tyson had had her for years, not just the better part of a workday, and why, now that he finally had her back, did the seconds keep sliding away from him?).

"What is it, sweetie?" He blinked, glancing down. An empty crossword and a full glass of water sat in front of him.

"I said, the shower's been going for forty-five minutes."

"Oh," he said absently, then dropped the pen he'd been absently clutching as he processed. "Oh."

"Do you want me..." Alexis trailed off, looking distinctly uneasy.

"No, pumpkin, I got it."

Battling the wave of worry that had welled in his throat, he jogged up the stairs and through the open door of the guest room. There was no response to his rap on the bathroom door. "Beckett," he called softly.

She didn't respond. He knocked harder. "Beckett! Can you hear me?" He tried not to let the panic that suddenly wound around his throat into his tone, but it was impossible, impossible to stop himself from flashing to the last time he stood outside a closed door, knocking and calling her name.

It only took one mental image of her lying on the floor (not drugged, not struggling to get away from Tyson, not this time, but maybe dying from an internal hemorrhage or an aneurysm or something else the damn EMTs hadn't found, and why hadn't he _insisted _that she go to the hospital?) before he was twisting frantically at the unlocked knob.

Thank God, Beckett was upright, standing in front of the shower.

Beckett was upright, standing in front of the shower in nothing but a lacy blue bra and a small black pair of panties.

His brain stuttered toward arousal, but the response was gone as quickly as it began. Irregular scratches, several of them far too deep, arced across her back; her wrists and ankles and throat were encircled by bright red wounds; her biceps were slightly bruised; the splint was still strapped to her right arm. But it was the dark, vivid bruise high on her left thigh, the vivid bruise with five points that were too much like finger marks, that froze him.

She hadn't noticed him come in.

"Kate?" he called softly, and she jerked, blinking, out of her trance.

"Sorry," she mumbled immediately, "I just zoned –" she blinked, eyes flicking over him, over herself, over the shower – "What the hell are you doing in here, Castle?"

"I knocked!" he defended immediately. "You've been in here for forty-five minutes."

"Oh," she responded softly. He waited silently. "I guess I just lost track."

"Your leg," he started, gesturing uncertainly.

She looked down blankly at the bruise. "Yeah," she finally said. She wasn't snapping or shoving him out of the room.

His throat felt tight. "Kate, did he –"

"What?" she blinked, dragging her gaze from the floor to his chest, "Oh. No."

"Your leg –" he started again, but he couldn't even give voice to it.

"I know," she murmured.

He was three steps ahead or behind her, hopelessly out of sync, and panic and horror made it hard to line his words up. "You weren't always awake. And the EMTs said –"

"I - I was awake for that. For the bruise. He was just... he was telling me about the murders. He got caught up in the story."

He shifted uncomfortably, not liking the vacant way she was staring, discomforted by the disjointed pieces of her answers with their own hazy logic. She shook her head sharply, opened the glass door, and stepped into the shower, disappearing abruptly from his field of view, still wearing her underwear.

He wasn't quite sure what to do with himself – he had always prided himself on his rather vivid imagination, but this particular scenario (a battered, blonde Beckett in the shower, him standing awkwardly in the middle of the stiflingly hot bathroom) escaped him – and he knew he should go, but she hadn't asked him to _leave_, not exactly – but of course he had barged in and started questioning her about oddly-placed bruises, and before that God only knew where her mind had been as she stood for forty-five minutes in front of the running shower.

_Leave, _he finally decided, _leave and give the woman some privacy before you seem even more voyeuristic. _

"I'll just – I'll be right in the guest room, Beckett," he said, projecting over the pounding of the falling water. "That okay?"

He was met by silence. Her hint for him to leave her the hell alone? "Beckett?" he called. "Just, can you give me a tap or a noise or, I don't know, something?"

No response, just the hissing of the shower, the stifling, oppressive steam. He shifted, exhaled, and stepped up next to the fogged shower door.

He could just make out her outline, standing directly under the stream of water, head bent, shoulders slumped. He could feel the heat of the steam billowing out and it had to be painful on her open abrasions, on the cuts on her back and throat and cheek, but she didn't move, didn't flinch.

"Kate?" he asked, maybe too softly - she continued to stand there, statue-still. Suddenly, he could think of nothing but the image Tyson had sent earlier that morning: her in that awful basement, hands bound behind her, blond hair dripping, body soaking wet. From that, he couldn't help but construct the events leading up to it: her slumped in a shower, bound, maybe drugged, choking on the spray. Suddenly, he was having trouble breathing.

"Screw it," he murmured, opening the shower door, just to make sure she was okay, just to see more than her fuzzy outline through a foggy shower door. She inhaled sharply as he peered into the shower, and she must have gotten a mouthful of water from the way she immediately began choking, leaning forward and wheezing for air, and why wasn't she stepping back and getting her face out of the damn stream?

"Sorry, sorry," he murmured, stepping in front of her almost by instinct, standing between her and the showerhead, shielding her from the spray. She glared at him weakly, squinting and coughing, but she didn't immediately step away. He was still dressed in a button down and slacks and dress shoes. His shirt immediately began to soak through with too-hot water, but the pain seemed far away, remote. Her breathing gradually evened.

"You know, in my many dreams of us showering together, I was never once wearing a shirt and pants. And you most _definitely_ never had any underwear on." His voice was only a little choked.

She edged her shoulder half an inch closer to him. "Just how many of these dreams have you had, Castle?"

He pretended not to hear how her rasping words wavered. "Oh, countless. For a while they were an almost nightly occurrence - after the MacGregor case."

"You mean after our fifteen block sprint through Central Park chasing Rodriguez in that ridiculous monsoon?"

"It was the way the water dripped off your nose as you shoved him into the squad car."

She looked as though she almost might have smiled. "Your way with words, Castle."

"Well. And your chest was heaving appealingly under the reasonably clingy fabric of your shirt."

"And ever since..."

"I've been plotting this moment." And then, because he couldn't help himself, "just without the clothes."

She heaved a sigh. He shifted a shade closer, and she shivered, her eyes telling him what she would never say aloud - _I'm hurting, I'm embarrassed, I hate this._

The stream of water had long-since soaked his shirt and pants, and the skin of his shoulders had gone from tingling to itching to fizzling pinpricks of pain. He turned slightly to bump the cold water up – it was so achingly hot that even if she wasn't standing under it, it couldn't have been good for her head – but she reached around and batted his hand away. "Leave it," she said, a tense rawness in her voice that he had never heard before. "I don't need any more cold showers."

He remembered, then, how frigid she had been as he'd untied her hands, how clammy the skin of her wrists had been under his fingers. "Tell me how to help you," he blurted, his back stinging from the intense heat of the water, his eyes burning in a way that had nothing to do with the damn shower.

She looked away. He stared, struggling for breath in the oppressive heat, the stifling silence. He edged another half inch closer. His entire body was a whisper away from hers, and he could feel the tension, an odd combination of relief and arousal and worry, vibrating through every part of him.

"I don't think," he murmured, finally unable to stop himself, "that the shower's going to help."

She huffed another sigh and narrowed her eyes. "I don't think that you need to start playing therapist with me."

He rocked back, murmuring "right" in response as he reached and turned down the hot water.

He could see her press her teeth together, could see the set of her shoulders as she readied herself for a fight, could see the instant she gave up, deflating with a small sigh as she regarded him solemnly, pushing a soaked shock of hair off her cheekbone. "You know," she said, "I realize that I'm speaking categorically based on very limited experience, but I don't think that blondes do have more fun."

For some reason that made him hurt instead of smile, made his pulse pound arrhythmically, and it was enough to strip away the final shreds of his restraint. He stepped forward, skidding his fingers around her curve of her slick waist, circling his arms around her gently, carefully. Her skin was slippery and smooth and too hot.

Her body stilled and tensed but she didn't jerk away, didn't knee him in the balls or twist his earlobe or throw him bodily out of the shower. "Castle," she murmured, watching him warily.

"I'm not going to hurt you," he whispered. "You can trust me."

"I do," she breathed, tilting forward, pressing her forehead into his shoulder. Her shoulders jumped and fell irregularly, and he could feel the hitch of her exhale against his clavicle.

_I'm sorry I couldn't protect you_, he wanted to say, but he swallowed the words, closing his eyes, sliding his palms slowly over the ridges of her spine, resting his lips against her hair as she shook quietly against him.

* * *

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So, sorry about the epic wait for that up there! (Also, I am sorry that Castle and Beckett were in a _together_ in a _shower_ and nothing even remotely sexy happened. I mean, come on.) You would have been waiting even longer were it not for the following:

1. Obviously, your wonderful beautiful singing elf reviews. I was all kinds of busy with things at which I am actually a gigantic moron (Things with formulas. And numbers. And spreadsheets. It was simply awful.) and I might have just given up on ever writing again for eternity and possibly even just on life itself were it not for the fact that I never, ever could have done that to my baby singing Christmas elves.

2. My completely awesome betas, who pointed out the parts that, technically, made less than no sense at all, and who spent far too long helping me rearrange, and who patted me on the head and told me that no, really, it would all be okay, when this chapter and I had this absolutely marathon brawl (it was all, "You can't tell me what to do!" and I was all, "What is your _problem_!" and it was all, "I don't need you!" and I was all, "Well I don't need you either!" and then we threw some plates and, I don't know, we're still not totally reconciled).

3. The now-tangible Like Midnight mascot, Elfie! I have absolutely zero talent for things involving real creativeness or artistry, so beings like Elfie just simply amaze me and I really do feel like they just fall from the Heavens Above because no human possibly could have every produced them. I owe a gigantic thank you to knittingeek for helping Elfie find her way to me. If you would like to see what she has been up to in her short stay in my abode (other, of course, than finding a very pointy pin and jabbing me repeatedly in the shin, saying "Post the next chapter! Post the next chapter, damn you!"), you can see her over at cartographical . livejournal . com/4806 . html#cutid1(you'll have to delete the spaces if you want to view her).


	17. Chapter 17

The first time, she woke to the soft rush of a warm exhale on her cheek. She jolted towards panic, her heart thundering double-time against her sternum, but then there was a hand brushing gently over her arm and Castle's voice breathing out, "Beckett, it's me," against her ear.

There was a half second after the panic sheared off at the comforting rumble of his voice that she floated in a blissful haze of half-awareness, not quite sure of where she was or why Castle was whispering into her ear, but content to drift in her nebulous cocoon. Then the pain crashed through her body and she was enveloped by the memory of Tyson, of his hands on her arms and her ankles and her hair and of the sharp edge of his speech. She sucked in a breath and sat up too quickly; the room wobbled, undulated, and a reproachful spasm raced up her back.

Castle crowded even further into her space, staring into her eyes with a singular intensity. The dim light of the bedside lamp illuminated the absolute seriousness of his face.

"Well," he finally murmured, "you haven't blown a pupil. Say something coherent and I'll let you get back to sleep."

"I only fell asleep the first time five minutes ago," she snapped - or tried to, but her voice came out in a hoarse, bedraggled whisper. The words scraped over her stinging throat, leaving behind a sharp ache that undoubtedly was caused less by her whispered words and more by her brief encounter with Tyson's rope, by her marathon of choked sobbing as Castle had held her in the shower. (She couldn't think of that, couldn't think of the steady shake of her body against the dripping cotton of his dress shirt, couldn't think of the slow drag of his fingers over the skin of her back, of the intimate steadiness of his inhales and exhales against her hair.)

He regarded her critically, his eyes sharp, a worried furrow running across his forehead. "The metal of the gun was cool and solid in his palm," he murmured, "and he spared a beat to think back to the first time he'd shot someone, to the slick sweat on his fingers. _Well_, Storm finally thought, stepping away from the crumpled body…" He stopped, dipped his chin, waited.

It took a moment, longer than it should have, for her to understand what he wanted, and then another moment for her to grasp the threads of his words and pick them up in her own memory. He waited patiently, and it absently occurred to her, in the quiet hush and muted shadows of the room, that before today she'd never seen so much of this particular quality of his, of this ability to shed his constant hum of motion, this ability to unrelentingly hold himself in still silence and wait for her. She found the end of his phrase in a shadowy corner of the New York Public Library. "_Better him than me_."

His face softened; a small smile slid across his lips. "You're good."

"And you're having delusions of grandeur."

"Story of my life. Your neurons are still firing, clearly. Go to sleep."

Before he left the room, he swept his lips across the top her forehead, and long after he walked away, she could feel the soft brush of his mouth against her skin.

* * *

The second time, she startled up to consciousness, throat tight with terror. She flailed toward the nightstand, hyperaware of the too-fast pulse of blood through her veins, but her gun wasn't there and it wasn't her nightstand and it wasn't her bed and it wasn't her room and she couldn't get enough air.

A brush of flesh against her forearm, and she lashed out blindly, reflexively, her knuckles sloppily connecting with the hard point of an elbow. Pain vibrated though her wrist, but she drew herself back, coiled her arm, tried to steady her quivering muscles and pounding pulse to prepare for a more coherent defense, but as she did a voice permeated the roaring in her ears. _I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, Beckett it's just me, it's me, I'm right here, I'm sorry_. As the realization crashed into her she sucked in a deep breath – Castle, it was Castle, she was at Castle's.

He must have seen her expression change; she caught a hint of panic etched across his face before he smoothed himself, changed on an inhale to a look of neutral comfort. He took a deep breath and made a show of rubbing his elbow. "You punch surprisingly hard for someone who's half asleep and in a wrist brace." His tone was light, and if she'd known him less well or if it were any darker she would have missed it, but the dim glow of the lamp was still enough for her to see the terror in his eyes.

"I'm sorry, Castle," she whispered, reaching out and tracing her fingers over his forearm, hoping that he could hear how much she was sorry for. Pain fizzed through her wrist, her back, her head, but she bit down on it, worried more about the shadows on his face.

He smiled a little, quirked his head, peered into her eyes, his face an inch from hers. "I really like checking your pupils," he murmured.

She fell happily into step with his deflection. "You're ridiculous."

"Storm took the torn, crumpled page of the novel out of the hand that had grown stiff in death. 'Huh,' he said, reading from the tattered paper. 'So we beat on, boats against the current…'"

She caught the thread immediately, filtered through a stack of books crammed in a dusty corner of her first apartment and then back to an uncomfortable plastic desk chair in the front row of a high school English class, and she felt almost offended that he'd thrown her the lob of a quote within a quote.

"'Borne back ceaselessly into the past.' Feeling insecure, Castle? Plain old Derrick Storm isn't quite good enough? You need to quote him quoting Fitzgerald?"

"Just trying to keep you stimulated."

She tilted toward normalcy. "Castle, you always keep me stimulated."

He huffed a quiet laugh and smiled but stayed silent. This time, before he left, he pressed his lips against the crown of her head, longer and steadier than before. Long after he walked away, through her half-lidded eyes, she could make out his shadow in her doorway until, finally, she sank down into sleep.

* * *

The third time, she was clinging to the edge of a dream rife with violent colors, with angry crimson and clear, hard cobalt. His quiet footfalls outside the door woke her before he stepped into the room. She could feel his presence in the doorway, hovering uncertainly.

"I'm awake," she rasped, wanting nothing more than to smooth away his hesitation.

"Good!" he called, game face on, undoubtedly shutting out whatever he was feeling in a way that had her lurching toward comfort and infuriation simultaneously. He paused briefly. "Why are you awake?"

"It's funny," she murmured, reaching for banter, reaching for something familiar, "this guy keeps wandering in and waking me up."

He deflated at that. "I know," he said, his silhouette hunching into itself.

She felt his pain press in on her. "Castle, loosen up," she said, pushing herself slowly into a sitting position, grasping at other words, words that must be out there, somewhere, that would level out the bow of his shoulders, words that she knew she wouldn't find.

He shuffled up to the bed. "Sorry," he murmured, flipping on the lamp.

When he leaned over to stare into her pupils, she could see the map of red vessels around his irises, the pink rims at the bottom of his eyes, the darkness of his gaze. She reached up and brushed her hand along the line of his neck, her index finger bumping over his skin. The brace around her wrist made the motion stiff, awkward. His muscles jumped under her hand. "What is it?" she murmured.

He dropped his gaze to his lap as he exhaled sharply. The air rushed against her lips and she wanted nothing more than to close the space between them, to tell him she was still there in the most visceral way she could. "Can I…" She trailed off, because what could she do?

"You can let me bring you to the hospital," he said, a sharp insistence forming more clearly along his jaw.

"Don't." The thought of the sterile rooms, the harsh lights, the undivided attention of anyone other than Castle, was too much. The air in the room grew thick, suffocating, pressing in on her chest. "I can't."

He was silent for a long time before his eyes softened and his jaw relaxed. Her chest loosened. She looked away from the map of red vessels in his eyes.

"His ribs hurt, his lungs burned, but as Storm stared at the burning building, he realized that nothing that he'd left in that room was…"

The words were more difficult to pick up this time; it was hard to navigate the cloud of pain and exhaustion, to rummage through a hazy nebula of memories. "Christ, Castle," she murmured, not quite able to admit defeat, "can't you just ask me who the president is or something?"

He raised an eyebrow and waited with his newfound stillness.

She dredged, floundered, found the edge of his thread of words near a faded armchair wedged in the corner of her senior-year doom room. "As important as what was in front of him."

He tipped his head to the side.

"I'm wrong? I'm not wrong."

"Close enough," he conceded. "You've won your hour-long pass to dreamland." He didn't draw away. His red-rimmed eyes searched her face as he shifted to sit on the bed, twisting into her, his hip brushing her thigh.

Words sifted through her brain - _I'm fine, don't worry, go rest, please stop, just don't _– but her head was heavy and her limbs were weightless and she lurched gracelessly toward sleep.

* * *

The fourth time, she awoke to a steady wash of words.

"The bullets wouldn't have bothered her, even without her vest, but she could feel Rook hovering somewhere behind her left shoulder."

She pried her eyes open. Castle was sitting on the bed, a stack of printer paper in his hands, squinting in the dim lamplight. He looked up when she shifted a leg.

"You're awake."

"You weren't exactly reading quietly," she murmured, not sure how to voice how comforting it was to swim up from unconsciousness toward the solid lilt of his words.

"Was too," he defended himself, scrunching his forehead. "I've been going for almost twenty minutes now."

She raised an eyebrow, ignoring the accompanying pain that shot through her skull as she tried to fix her best _elaborate, please_ glare on him.

"You – you weren't sleeping soundly." He stared at his hands, ran the pad of a thumb along the edge of the stack of paper.

She reached out – left arm, this time, she was learning – and laid her palm against the top of his hand. "It's okay," she murmured, sliding into the lie with surprising ease, and even though they both knew it was too far from the truth, it was enough to make him drag his eyes away from his lap and look searchingly into her eyes. "It's a Castle-themed kind of night for you, is it?"

"It's hard, writing words that are so alluring."

"You gonna patronize me again?"

Castle smiled. "'Camilla,' Storm said, 'I don't care about tomorrow. Come home with me tonight.'"

The phrase floated in the hazy, bleak space after her mother's death, twined through a fog of unfinished police reports and empty bourbon bottles. "Something about putting a gun away first."

"You're slipping," he said. She just barely caught the jagged edge of concern underneath his words as she faded into a dream.

* * *

The fifth time, she spent too long conscious only of the threads of pain that snarled around her body, of the different, suffocating hurt of total exhaustion, before Castle's voice pulled her the rest of the way to awareness. She was suddenly conscious of the warm weight of his palm smoothing up and down, up and down her bicep, of the press of her chest and her stomach against the length of his torso, of the jut of her shin into the side of his calf, and she'd barely started to wonder why when she found the vaguest wisp of a memory, of threading her fingers through his as he'd started to raise himself from the bed, of tugging him back down to her and of coiling up against his side, into his steady warmth, of feeling her limbs melt effortlessly into his body.

"Ow," she rasped, feeling the last pieces of sleep fall away and a fiery paroxysm of pain burst through her head, her back, her wrist.

"You with me?" he asked. She could feel the tightness of his muscles, the shallowness of his breathing. She rolled away from him and stared up at the ceiling, at the pattern of shadows that shifted and spun with each breath.

"Yeah." Her head pulsed in time with her heart, and she wanted nothing more than to sink back into the darkness. Exhaustion and frustration coiled in her stomach, stung at her eyes.

"You didn't wake up so easily. I – I was worried."

She exhaled, wanting to tell him she was fine, wanting to assure him that she would be okay, that they would be okay, but she felt flattened, empty, run-through. He shifted into her, pressed his hand against her stomach.

"You're shaking," he said. She felt it only then, a deep vibration racing along her torso.

"I'm tired," she whispered, the exhaustion wrapping itself even more completely around her.

"Let me bring you to the hospital," he said. Even as she started to shake her head _no_, she felt a tumbling sense of inevitably, a rush of impending acceptance.

"I'll buy you a new apartment," he continued. "As a reward for being a good patient."

His finger traced random patterns over her bicep, her elbow, her forearm, whispering circles and ellipses, his forearm resting lightly on her chest. She felt herself unwinding, uncoiling, under the almost-invisible brush of his thumb.

"How long have you been holding onto that one?" Even through her disjointed jumble of thoughts, she knew he'd offered too suddenly to have just had the idea.

"Was that a _no_?"

"Castle." She tried his name as a warning, but it came too soft, too unfocused.

"It could have gargantuan picture windows and a massive Jacuzzi tub," he murmured against her hair. "You could overlook Central Park or the Hudson or I bet, if you wanted, we could find you a SoHo loft that matches this one."

She shoved an elbow over into his side as sharply as she could manage and was rewarded with a pained whoosh of air.

"That _was _a no," he groaned. "I do respond to verbal cues, Beckett."

"No, you don't."

"You can call me kitten. You can call me kitten for a whole week."

"Wow, pulling out _kitten_. You _must _be desperate."

She felt the steady rhythm of his breaths stop for a beat. "I am," he finally said, too quiet, too intense to be anything other than sincere.

"Castle," she started, not sure why she was trying anymore but determined to cling to whatever vestige of normalcy she could possibly salvage. She turned to see him but looked back up at the ceiling immediately – the open worry in his eyes was too much, was nothing she could handle.

He folded into her, his forehead up against her temple, his lips against her jaw, unhesitant. "Please."

She grasped toward the familiar, toward rules and structure. "No coddling, if I do."

His head dipped against her. "No coddling."

"No buying me an apartment."

Another dip, a little more muted than the first. "No apartment."

She still couldn't find it, couldn't get at the words to acquiesce.

"For me," he breathed against her.

"For you."

* * *

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Hi again, everyone! I have absolutely no excuses for how long it took me to produce this thing. (Actually, that is untrue. I have lots of excuses, including many things in the Real World and a horrifying, crippling sneak!attack of Writer's Block out of whose icy clutch I will hopefully escape sometime before, I don't know, 2012.) Extra special groveling sniveling thanks to: Fialka62 and JillianCasey, who kept oh-so-nicely reminding me that yes, I can use my words to express things instead of flailing about incoherently all over the interwebz; Knittingeek, who somehow found me me the MOST FABULOUS WONDERFUL LIKE MIDNIGHT MINION in the entire universe (my feelings towards this adorable thing, you guys, I cannot even describe it, you simply must just go visit him at cartographical . livejournal . com/ 5101 . html#cutid1 - take the spaces out to see him); and obviously, last but never least especially when they are dancing around with their pitchforks singing eerie Christmas songs as they prepare to jab me in my eyeballs because I have not fed them in so long, my beautiful fantastic singing elf reviews.


	18. Chapter 18

Stop. Yes, you. Hold on for one second. Do you not remember anything that happened in the previous seventeen chapters of this story? And then, maybe you thought about going back and reading it to catch yourself up, but you realized it was thousands, nay, tens of thousands, of words? And maybe you would have remembered some of those words, if a certain Cartographical had not neglected to update for **two and a half months**? Well, believe it or not, the author herself had these problems, and to keep herself straight, she slogged through and made herself a little baby summary, a CliffNotes, if you will, of every chapter. So, if you feel like you need some recap, head on over here to my LiveJournal for an I-am-sure-only-slightly-incoherent summary of the story up to the start of this chapter - just delete the spaces or you'll never get there: http:/ cartographical . livejournal . com/ 5598 . html#cutid1

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* * *

Every time his eyes slipped shut, red poured through the darkness, spilling into inky space: red from her throat, red glistening on the knife; her gasps for air, the sympathetic, horrified constriction of his own throat.

"I'm sorry," a man in front of him was saying. Castle blinked, tried to push away the image of the crimson still swirling through the corners of his consciousness. He rifled through his memory for a name to put to the face - silver hair, clear, worried blue eyes - and found a picture in a frame wedged in the corner of Beckett's mantle. He should have known, anyway: there was the same hard sweep of a jaw, the same six-degree tilt of the head in concern.

His brain stuttered for a beat, still foggy from sleep, from the red that refused to rush away even though he was finally all the way back to consciousness. Finally, he fully processed the presence of the man in front of him. He had been slumped in his chair, one knee wedged under an armrest, his spine angled awkwardly against the back of the seat. Springing suddenly up, he cracked a hard space between the vertebrae in his lower back and firmly yanked on a tendon in his knee as he extricated himself from the chair in a violent jerk.

"Rick Castle," Jim continued, ignoring Castle's awkward hop and quickly grabbing his outstretched hand. "Jim Beckett – call me Jim. I know Katie said she was fine and I should just drop by tomorrow, but her phone was off when I called and when I rang your house your daughter said she was at the hospital, and I just -" he broke off, the lost look on his face pressing sharply at Castle's sternum. Beckett had been insistent, both with him and in her brief phone conversations with her father and Lanie: yes, she was great, no, none of it was a big deal, no, no, no, there was no need at all to visit, maybe tomorrow or later in the weekend when she was feeling a little more rested. Castle had bitten back his protests – just like he had when she'd originally refused the hospital - but now, faced with the reality of her father's panic, he wished he'd pushed harder.

"I'm sorry," was all he could finally say. "I should have called. She's okay. I mean -" he spread his hands, palms up, and shrugged his shoulders helplessly.

"Katie doesn't like people to worry."

"I know," Castle said, feeling his social graces rush away, feeling suddenly bereft, the hole of Beckett's disappearance still gaping through his chest, not yet healed even though she was warm and alive and safe, just down hall.

A cheerful nurse strode over purposefully, saving him from his futile search for words. "Mr. Castle? Nurse Hawthorne. Detective Beckett sent me out for you. She's just back from the CAT scan, and you can go see her if you'd like."

"Is she –"

"She's fine. She even said not to wake you if you were sleeping."

Castle glanced over at Jim. The nurse eyed him. "She didn't mention…" she trailed off apologetically.

"I just got here. I'm her father," he said briskly.

"Oh," the nurse said, balanced on the balls of her feet, looking ready enough to walk off without either of them in tow.

"We can't both –"

"Sorry. At this hour, I'm bending it a little with just one of you, but I know she's been through a lot and she'll be here a while longer." Castle's heart punched once, emphatic, at his rib cage, and it must have been written on his face because she smiled and continued. "Just for a few more tests," she said, "Not because we're concerned about any one thing."

Jim Beckett looked like he felt. "You go," Castle said.

Jim didn't even try to protest, just said a muted, "Thank you," already trailing the nurse through the double glass doors. Castle was left, shoulders slumped, standing alone in the middle of the waiting room.

* * *

He woke to the sound of a hard crack and was on his feet still half asleep, his hand moving up to cradle the back of his skull before he was really aware.

"And it serves you right," Lanie was saying to him, shaking her head. "You'd both be home getting a full night of sleep if you'd gotten her to the hospital immediately."

"Ow. _Ow,_" Castle said, piecing together that something – or someone - had startled him awake, and he'd cracked his head on the drywall hard enough that a throbbing pain was drilling down his spine and through his skull.

"And then not _calling_ me as soon as you were on your way over here; if you hadn't just cracked your own head I'd do it for you."

He heard a soft chuff from a nearby chair and turned to face the sound. "Sir – Mr. Beckett – Jim -" he started, shaking his head slightly, "I didn't know you were back."

"I didn't want to wake you," he said, and then, after a tiny pause, "you didn't tell me she was blond."

"Whatnow," Lanie snapped, but she didn't wait to hear the answer, just spun on her heel toward the nurse's station and began a very firm conversation with the man behind the desk. After some emphatic enunciations of several acronyms, including _MD _and _NYPD _and some other quick syllables that Castle couldn't quite make out, Lanie was striding towards Beckett's room without a backward glance.

"Results of the CAT scan were normal," Jim told him. "Just a bad concussion. The doctor was just finishing up her back. Twelve stitches total. She'll have two or three scars."

"How was she?" Castle asked, the idiotic question out of his mouth before he could stop it.

"I don't know." Jim shrugged, looking lost. "Not thrilled to see me, and she probably would have hidden it better if she were a little more rested and in a little less pain."

"I'm sorry," Castle said, feeling the pulsing ache of failure deep in his stomach.

Jim looked over Castle's shoulder, sighing. "Katie said she'd be dead if it weren't for you. No question."

"It's not –" Castle started, but he couldn't quite voice the words. It was selfish, only selfish, he couldn't have lived without her, couldn't, _couldn't_ have found her strangled body dumped in an alley, would have never gotten past that, would have carried it with him until it killed him.

Jim reached over, squeezed Castle's forearm. "You can rest – they said it would be a while before she's ready. You could probably even go home."

"No," he said, throat spasming around the word. "I'm staying."

"Well, then, at least go back to sleep," Jim said. "They're taking her in for x-rays of her wrist soon, but she said no one's been in too much of a rush after they got the CAT scan back."

_No, I'll wait up_, Castle wanted to say, but the effort to protest was too much, and he rested his head on his hand, just for an instant, just to placate Jim, just to reassure the man that he would try, but as he opened his mouth to say as much the past week and day and night came rushing up with a swirl of darkness to meet him.

* * *

He awoke midway through a fall, right elbow stinging from a jolt off the plastic waiting room chair, left arm thrown into open space to steady himself, his stomach roiling from the sensation of plummeting.

"Oh, good, you're awake," Esposito said, looking slightly vicious. "Don't quite understand how you managed to snore through the ten minutes of Lanie chewing Ryan and I out in the middle of the waiting room."

"How is that my fault?" Castle asked, gathering enough of his wits to look affronted. The waiting room was quiet. Lanie was in a chair next to Jim, hunched forward, her hand on his knee, whispering something.

Ryan grinned slightly. "He's just mad because Lanie implied that Beckett still managed to intimidate him even when she was doped up and injured."

Esposito huffed. "She didn't _imply_; she said it flat out, and she said the same thing about you."

"Yeah, but I'm not in denial," Ryan responded.

Castle tilted his head, vaguely remembering a phrase strung through a fuzzy dream – _And if you can't get her to the hospital yourselves next time – not that you will _ever_ let there be a next time – you can damn well call me or someone else with bigger balls than you apparently have_ – and decided it was better not to ask any more questions.

"Anyway," Esposito said, "we're headed in now. Need to get a statement as of, well, yesterday."

Castle stumbled up to his feet. "Think they'll let me come?"

"Yeah, we're cleared and they're on normal visiting hours, now."

Nurse Hawthorne eyed them skeptically but stayed silent as Ryan and Esposito strode down the hallway and Castle trotted after them, feeling inexplicably nervous.

An older doctor emerged from her room just as they arrived, but he didn't say anything, just looked the group up and down and nodded a terse hello as they stepped through the door.

Castle's eyes tripped over her blond hair, as they did now every time he saw her, but it was the tense set of her shoulders, the near-trembling tilt of her head, that he paused on, that let him know how brittle she was with exhaustion. He glanced at his watch, tried to calculate how long they'd been there (five hours? six hours?), tried to figure how much sleep she'd missed the night before.

"Hey, guys," she said, speaking in a now-characteristic rasp, a combination of fatigue and swelling from the attempted strangulation.

"Aren't they supposed to make you look at least a little better in the hospital?" Esposito asked softly, a quiet not-quite-joke that held a little too much truth - her skin was more translucent, her eyes more tired, her bruises more livid.

She quirked her lips at Esposito, breathing out softly. "Told you it was useless." She held up her wrist, encased in a thicker, sturdier brace. "Just a bad sprain on my wrist though, and negative on the sexual assault evidence collection kit." (She couldn't quite keep all of her smile on through the last phrase, and though Castle held the _negative_ in his brain, repeated it again and again, rolled it around like a mantra, he couldn't stop the wave of violent nausea at the thought.) She plowed on. "How's Tyson?"

"Clean shot through the shoulder. He's over at Presbyterian under monitoring, but if he holds steady we'll be able to get him in a cell by tomorrow."

"Secure?"

Esposito nodded sharply. "We've got a rotating shift of two from the 12th on him, and that's in addition to Haines and Garabaldi, who've been plastered to him since we got him. I told them it was okay for them to go home and sleep, but I don't think they're moving until he's in a cell."

Castle felt a smile pull at his lips. "Good to know some things don't change." He winced as soon as the words left his mouth because so much had, but Beckett had a shadow of a grin, too, before her eyes darkened.

"You need a statement."

"Yeah," Ryan said.

"Castle," she rasped, and he could feel it coming.

"No," he said, "look, I already –"

She cut him off. "I can't –" she started, paused. "You're not…"

And he understood, found her meaning in a flash, a picture of her talking through her statement: Tyson squatting in front of her, tying her to a chair, his fingers tangling the dye through her hair, his arms thrusting her into a freezing shower, and Castle, standing in the room, flinching, his face crumpling, mirroring her own feelings back to her.

"I'll be right outside," he whispered.

"Thank you," she said, already shifting to face Ryan and Esposito with a resolute stiffness that had nothing to do with physical pain.

He wasn't sure how long she was in there with them. He was exhausted, but he didn't sleep this time, didn't let his burning eyes drift shut, didn't allow himself to curl down onto the floor or walk over to the plastic chair halfway down the hall. He stood straight, so straight outside the door, for as long as he could. Finally, the thought of her in the next room, telling her story, dry-eyed and straight-backed, to Ryan and Esposito; the thought of her in that basement, fighting for her life, one pound of pressure and one minute away from dying with a rope around her neck, was too much for him. He bent forward, resting his head against the cool plaster of the hospital wall, shutting his eyes and telling himself, over and over, that she was alive, that she was fine, was fine, would be fine.

Doctors and nurses might have tried to speak to him. There was noise in the hall, occasionally, carts wheeling by and people speaking sharply to each other about nothing he could bring himself to care about, but he didn't pay attention until he heard the door to her room open next to him and felt Ryan's hand on his shoulder, a firm, steady squeeze. "You're okay to go in now," was all the younger man said, his voice hoarse, and Castle didn't look at him, didn't want to see Beckett's statement written on his face, just nodded his thanks and stumbled into the room.

Her eyes were dry and her jaw was set. She looked less tired than before, more on edge, and he could feel himself wanting to unravel at her vivid bruises, blond hair, determined eyes.

"So help me if you cry again, Castle," was the first thing she rasped at him. "I won't be keeping it a secret for long."

"Beckett –" he started, then revised. "Kate. I just wanted you to know –"

Her sharp sigh cut him off, not that he was sure what he'd have said. "Don't. Whatever it is, wait until we're less tired; wait until we haven't been sitting in some godforsaken hospital room for hours on end."

He paused, curbed whatever was about to come out of his mouth. She was right, of course; she was so often right – he'd checked her in her apartment earlier when her hands had crept under his shirt, and what he was doing now was no different, a desperate attempt to reach out and reconnect (of course hers was physical and his was with words, but it was the same, the same misguided impulse). "Right," was all he said.

"I'm fine," she rasped. "I'm fine and you're fine. We're fine."

He struggled for words that weren't the declarations of undying love that clogged his throat, struggled and came up empty, but a sharp rap on the door followed by a doctor in a lab coat saved him.

"Detective Beckett," the doctor said, flipping through the thick chart at the foot of her bed. "You can go home now."

* * *

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Hello again, my beautiful darling elflets! I do not want to be hasty with my proclamations, but I really do think that my muse may be alive after all. Things at Place of Employ were frenetic enough that I did not really have time to search for her for, um, a while (I did have time, for at least several minutes a day, to lie on my couch, drooling on myself and occasionally twitching spasmodically from stress). However, things have calmed slightly, enough that my half-blind, mostly lame, virus-ridden muse has returned to me. I know that by now many of my wonderful singing elf reviews have ditched their little Christmas hats and Santa suits for sunglasses and sarongs, but they will always be full of Yuletide cheer for me. Really, truly, I am sorry I abandoned you all for so long, and I am seriously, crazily, overwhelmingly happy to see you all again!


	19. Chapter 19

She would forever remember the weeks after Tyson took her in technicolor flashes of contact. Conversations and people and time tumbled together, twining and hazing into a vague wash of gray, but a few touches dragged their moments out of the dusky mist. 

* * *

They were sitting in plain room, muted beige, sharp plaster lines, nothing for the eyes to catch on. She was in a sturdy chair. An equally sturdy, spacious couch formed a right angle with her chair. Despite his ample available seating options, Castle had crowded over to the closest edge of the couch, tilting toward her in some kind of misguided attempt to make her feel more comfortable.

It wasn't working.

Montgomery had stopped by the loft the day before, sat her down in the living room, told her, in no uncertain terms, that she was not to set foot in the precinct before going through mandatory therapy sessions. Castle had retreated briskly to the kitchen once he'd seen her bristle. She had no doubt whose side he'd be on in this fight (she could count on him, almost always, to stand solidly with her, except where issues of her health or safety were concerned), but they both knew that Montgomery didn't need any help to win this battle.

Castle had cajoled her to Dr. Sehl's – "one of the most preeminent therapists in New York City," he'd said, and she'd shaken her head but had gone along, just wanting to get it over with so they'd let her back to work. She'd been so impatient that she'd barely protested when Castle had insisted on bringing her, just sighed and nodded.

She'd expected an office full of glass and brass and burnished wood, a hazy prediction that probably stemmed from connotations of the word _preeminent _and Castle's hand in the process. The lack of excessive aesthetics was almost comforting, just not as comforting as it should have been. She couldn't quite relax her jaw. She kept allowing her leg to bounce a little. Her wrist still hurt. Her back still hurt. Her head still hurt. She kept her hair in a ponytail, always, so the blond locks wouldn't brush into her line of sight.

"This is nice," Castle said, breaking a long silence. "Not too pretentious."

"Mmm," Beckett hummed.

"You don't want a therapist's office that's too pretentious. You want one that's sturdy, functional."

"Mmmhmm," she murmured.

"You know," he said, "the word psychiatry originates in the ancient Greek word psyche, which means soul or butterfly. The Greeks thought the psyche was responsible for behavior, and in mythology, butterflies were often depicted as the manifestations of human souls. In fact, Eros' lover…" he finally trailed off at her unwavering glare.

"Castle?"

"Yes, dear?"

"Shut up."

He smiled, edged forward an inch, then another, until he was perched even more precariously on the edge of the cushion, until she was certain he was about to dump himself onto the floor, until his knee was pressed firmly into hers, the sharp edge of his tibia pushing insistently into her patella.

The feeling in her knee was a different kind of ache than her back or her head or her wrist, an ache that sent warmth shooting up her body, and when she looked up Castle's face she saw such complete understanding that she dropped her gaze again, down to his denim-clad leg pressing sharply into hers. 

* * *

She started right after Castle had left for the grocery store. He'd been unwilling to leave the house for any length of time without her, but she and Alexis had finally managed to cajole him into running some errands. She hadn't wanted him around when she was trying to do this.

Mixing the hair dye had been difficult, as so many things were, with one wrist encased in the thick brace, but she'd done it methodically, working with a singular purpose, concentrating so ferociously that it was a surprise to her, almost, when the acrid scent of the dye fully permeated the bathroom.

The air suddenly seemed too thick, and though she tried to steady her breathing – in through her nose, out through her mouth, hold for two seconds, repeat – she was somehow suddenly exiting the bathroom into the hallway with a stride that was a touch faster than purposeful.

Her chest slammed into Alexis' shoulder, and they both jerked back, hard. She could feel the girl's eyes taking in the scene – Beckett, her breath a little too fast, her body tense, the smell of hair dye drifting into the hallway.

"Shi – sorry, Alexis," Beckett grit out, smoothing her hands over the front of her old cotton shirt.

"No, no," Alexis stuttered, reaching out hesitantly, her fingers hovering half a foot from Beckett's arm. "I didn't mean to..." She swallowed visibly. Alexis hadn't been avoiding her, not exactly. She'd gone out of her way to make Beckett feel at home, but the girl had been restrained around her; a little more diffident, a little quieter. Beckett had no idea how much Alexis had heard about her time with Tyson, but she watched Alexis' eyes flick over her and then toward the bathroom before the girl smiled a little and motioned toward the stairs. "I was going to make some coffee, but for some reason it always comes out weird unless I make two servings. Ratio's off, or something."

Beckett hesitated. She wanted nothing more than to go back into the bathroom, to fix the mess of blond still clipped up on her head, but her heart was still crashing erratically against her sternum and with her wrist she wouldn't have been able to do more than a halfassed job and she could feel the lure of sitting in the warm, bright kitchen with Alexis, as far as possible from the ever-present shadows of her time with Tyson. (When she went back upstairs, hours later, the bathroom was mysteriously absent of dye, and it smelled strongly of jasmine.)

The coffee from the French press was strong and gritty and hot. She relished the burn going down her throat as she sat silently next to Alexis, her eyes fixed on the bright chrome of the refrigerator.

Alexis finally spoke, once, quietly. "I'm glad you're okay." Her words were gravelly, laced with guilt. It threw Beckett for an instant, but, there it was, Angela Branson was an Alexis look-a-like, and yes, they had all thought Tyson would gun for Alexis rather than Beckett.

_It's not your fault _was meaningless; Beckett had heard the words too many times and they always had a hollow, useless echo. She decided on the raw truth: "I'm glad, that if it had to be someone, it was me."

Alexis' chin wobbled once, slightly, as Beckett reached out and squeezed her hand. The girl let out a shaky sigh, and Becket could feel some of her tension dissolving as they sat in the companionable quiet.

Beckett hadn't realized how tense she herself had remained until she jumped at the snick of a key in the lock.

"Oh, coffee," Castle said cheerily, just a little too quickly to achieve the nonchalant tone he seemed to be striving for. "Is there some for me?"

Alexis gave a put-upon sigh. "I suppose I can make more."

She pushed up and clattered around the kitchen, grinding beans, emptying and refilling the press. Beckett decided not to mention that the girl seemed perfectly adept at making a single serving of coffee.

"She looks happier," Castle said, depositing his grocery bags on the counter and moving closer behind Beckett.

"Yeah," Beckett replied. Alexis did have a touch of her characteristic vibrancy back.

His hands softly smoothed over Beckett's shoulders, then rested. The heat leeched through the thin cotton of her shirt, burrowed into her muscles. Her shoulders dropped one, two inches, the tension slowly melting away under the soothing weight of his palms. 

* * *

She'd been able to tell that Castle had been blindsided when she brought up going home. He'd been studiously avoiding the topic, going out of his way to make sure that she had everything she needed in the loft, and maybe he'd thought that if nobody mentioned it, she'd be okay staying there with him forever. After talking in circles for fifteen minutes, they were both frustrated and frazzled.

"It's been almost a week, Castle," she said, voice deadly low. "You can't have expected me to stay here forever. The cleaners have it all taken care of at my place. There's no reason for me to stay."

"It's not _safe_," he snapped back, his refrain for the past ten or so minutes, and she couldn't quite figure whether he really believed that or whether he was afraid to let her out of his sight for fear she'd have some sort of nervous breakdown (she'd been flinching, sometimes, at odd things: a hand reaching over to get a tv remote, Alexis' calf brushing hers when she went to get a mug yesterday morning).

"It's fine, Castle," she growled. "I'm sorry it's not what you think is best for me, but I can't keep putting my life on hold for you." She regretted the words as soon as she'd spoken them; if anything, he'd been putting his life on hold for her over the past week.

Something flashed in his eyes, something deep and angry, something full of other emotions she refused to process. He'd been standing maybe five feet from her in the kitchen, and he took one, two quick steps toward her, closing the gap between them in an instant.

She felt an icy sort of panic constrict her muscles, freeze her mind.

The next thing she was truly conscious of was the soft yield of his lip under the momentum of her knuckles. She checked, but it was too late; both of them were stumbling backwards, blood already dripping from his split lip, pain radiating through her wrist (splinted, she finally realized as she tried to flex her fingers; she'd lashed out blindly with her sprained wrist).

Apologies tumbled from both their lips simultaneously – _I'm sorry I'm sorry I shouldn't have I should have known better I'm sorry_– and they both jolted awkwardly towards each other before she flinched away.

"Let me," she murmured, jerking the freezer open, pulling out an ice pack, gracelessly grabbing some paper towels.

He was standing unmoving, watching her from the center of the kitchen. Blood was on his lip, his chin. Her cheeks burned. Her heart stumbled against her ribs, erratic, frenetic.

"I didn't mean…" she said, poised between handing him the ice pack and dropping it to flee to the guest room upstairs.

"No," he said, too quickly. "No. It was my fault."

Her throat felt thick, tight, at the sight of his blood, at his lack of willingness to blame her. She forced herself through the space between them, wrapped the paper towel around the pack and held it to his lip. Her thumb brushed the bottom of his chin, and she jerked away, hard, lurched back a step and wound up poised awkwardly three feet away from him, her hand slightly raised, still cradling the ice pack.

"_I'm _not safe. For you. For Alexis," she began, because after this, she couldn't stay, wouldn't stay, and it would be best to finish the conversation now, when he'd be ready, willing, to let her leave.

"Bullshit," he growled. She shook her head, vibrating with anger at herself. "That's a stupid excuse for you to run and you know it."

She flicked her eyes at his swollen lip, shrugged despondently.

"I don't care about that," he huffed, then - staring at the brittle set of her shoulders - backtracked. "Look. You want to make up for it, stay for a while. Stay until you're cleared for work. Stay until you can find a different rental."

She tensed to move away, but he quietly crowded into her space, lightly wrapped his hand around hers and tugged it up, drawing the ice pack, still clutched tightly between her fingers, back against his lip. Somehow, the fingers of her other hand followed, drifted to rest lightly on his face. His jawbone was warm, defined, scratchy with stubble. If her wrist hadn't been sprained or if she hadn't drawn back as her punch connected, she might have broken it.

"This doesn't hurt," he rumbled. "If you leave now, that will hurt."

Through that burning connection she could feel his panic, an almost tangible presence, at the thought of her returning to that sublet (and if she let herself think about it, his panic was a reflection of her own, the clench in her gut she got every time she thought of going back to sleep in the bed where Tyson had jammed a syringe into her hip, to the apartment he had so easily dragged her out of in a twilight haze in just as the sun was breaking over the tops of skyscrapers).

She didn't answer in words, but she kept the ice held gently against his lip, kept her other hand pressed against the warmth of his jaw. 

* * *

Ten days of going nowhere but Dr. Sehl's from Castle's loft. Castle hadn't pushed her, not since the incident in the kitchen. He'd stayed quiet when she'd refused his invitations to shopping, dinner, movies, the park. His plan, apparently, was to wait her out, and it turned out that ten days was all it took for her to need something different, something other than the beige walls of the therapist's, the black leather of the car, the sleek maple of Castle's hardwood floors.

"The Strand," she said on a rainy morning as Castle plunked a mug of coffee in front of her.

His lip was only the slightest bit swollen, now. She could almost look at him without guilt twisting her, making her want nothing more than to curl in on herself and never face the outside world again.

"Eighteen lustrous miles of books, or the hotel next to the last known sighting of Derrick Manu?"

(Esposito had been sneaking her some files – 'Ryan and I could use some insight. It's a weird one. And it will keep you from strangling Castle,' he'd said over the phone, an hour before stopping by with the basic info, though she had a sneaking suspicion that keeping her in the loop was as much for the convenient excuse it provided him and Ryan and Lanie to stop by the loft as it was for her perspective.)

"Books. I'm going," she said.

"Well, Detective Beckett, I happen to be rather fond of books myself."

"Fishing for an invitation?"

"I'll buy you a latte. Or a novel. Or the Strand."

She shook her head. "You do a great job playing it cool, Castle."

"I'm choosing to take this lack of outright refusal as acceptance."

She hadn't thought it was a bad idea until they were walking through the store, the aisles tall and narrow, crammed with books, and people everywhere, people whose eyes flicked over her, resting on the splint on her wrist, the abrasions on her neck, the fading bruise on her cheek, the stiff way in which she carried her torso (the mess of blond waves that still shocked her every time she looked in the mirror). She set her chin and met their gazes head on, daring them to say something, daring them to judge her, but it was exhausting, feeling so combative, and every time she turned and ran her fingers along a spine, she could feel eyes, eyes always on her.

Castle had begun shifting closer and closer, shielding her as best he could, cramming himself into her space, orbiting constantly around her. The warmth of his nearness helped, slowed her pulse slightly, until she meandered down to the basement. She had been wandering mindlessly, trying to draw comfort from the array of books, but her skin felt clammy, prickling. The rough edges of the cement above her seemed cold, threatening, and somehow she managed to walk herself into the law section in a back corner, lit only by a dim fluorescent flickering its way to a burnout. She felt a tightness compressing her chest, shortening her breath. Even so, somehow it was still a surprise that when she lifted her hand to touch a tattered copy of _This Side of Paradise _that someone had left wedged between oversized jurisprudence books, her fingers were trembling too violently to close properly around the book.

Then Castle was even closer behind her, his left hand gently curling her fingers closed, his right hand reaching above her shoulder to grab the book, his chest a breath away from her back. Some far-away part of her former self told her to tense and sidestep, but something else took over. Before she could stop herself, she tilted back, melting into the solid bulk of his chest for one beat, two, letting his hand stay curled around hers. She allowed her eyes to slip shut, just for an instant longer than a blink, her lower back dissolving into the firm planes of his lower abdomen, and her breathing slowed to match his and her fingers steadied into his and for that moment all that mattered was the steady warmth of him against her. 

* * *

She was curled on his couch, the muted TV sending lights flickering around the otherwise dark room. It was two, maybe three, maybe four in the morning, but she couldn't sleep, couldn't break the comfortable cocoon of exhaustion enveloping her.

A thump, and Castle stumbled into the living room, tripping over himself, fumbling for the light. He was wearing a faded cotton shirt and boxers. His hair was spiked. His eyes were red.

_Another one? _she almost asked, but held it back. He seemed to have convinced himself that she either didn't notice or didn't care about his nightmares, but she saw: she'd seen the tense angle of his shoulders the morning before, she'd seen him hovering in her just-cracked doorway at one in the morning two nights ago.

"You're not sleeping," he said, his face creasing with worry.

Well, if he was going to call her out like that. "And _you're _having nightmares."

He shuffled over and gracelessly plunked down next to her on the couch. His thigh rested against hers, so lightly that it was almost invisible. "You don't?" he asked.

She would have been startled at his openness, usually, but the night felt quiet and soft and unreal and she couldn't quite conjure up the surprise. "No." She reached out, trailing her index finger over his bare knee. "Dr. Sehl says everyone deals with trauma in different ways."

His exhale was a half second longer than usual – surprised, probably. He drove her to the therapist's office three times a week (the more frequent the sessions, she'd decided early on, the faster she could return to work, and although by now none of her injuries would really prevent her from driving herself, it was a comfortable rhythm they both were almost unwilling to give up), but she never mentioned anything about the sessions and he never asked her.

She slid her finger down his knee, rested the flat of her palm on the very bottom of his quad. His muscles shivered slightly. "Maybe you could set up an appointment with him."

He chuffed. "Therapists aren't quite my scene. They're all fascinated by divorce and absent fathers. The phrase _emotionally cavalier _has been used to describe me more than once."

She turned into him, drawing her legs up. Her knees rested on his thigh, the worn fabric of her leggings thin enough to allow her to feel every muscle, every breath. She felt, suddenly and overwhelmingly, a desire to touch more of him, a desire that had been muted, barely even humming in the background, since she'd kissed him in the wreckage of her apartment. "You don't seem emotionally cavalier to me," she said.

He reached out, skimmed the smooth pads of his fingers along her cheek. "I'm not," he said, "not with you."

She wasn't sure who initiated it, but somehow the space between them evaporated, and his lips met hers softly, slowly, more steady and measured than either of their other kisses.

"I'm so happy you're here," Castle rumbled, and she wasn't sure which layer of meaning to respond to, couldn't even begin to return the sentiment verbally, so instead she slowly pressed him against the back of the couch and tilted even further in and tried to show him, with her palms stroking over his ribs and her tongue slicking into his mouth, how happy she was to be there, too, in every sense. 

* * *

She woke from a dream with desire burning through her, an overwhelming urge to reach out and touch Castle, and before she could stop the thought, it was there – _Why not?_

She came up empty on the answer – no Josh, no Gina, and she couldn't still be worried about his being there for her.

They'd been kissing, lately. In the kitchen, when he was drying pans. On the oversized armchair, as she tried to read a book. In the hallway, after she'd emerged, warm and damp, from another three-minute shower (every day, she felt a little less tense in the bathroom, but she still wouldn't take long showers, still hadn't even tried to buy hair dye since her one failed attempt).

At the very end of their session the day before, Dr. Sehl had regarded her critically for a long moment before saying, "You seem happier."

"Castle…" she'd begun, but couldn't think of a way to continue that differentiated her from a fourteen-year-old girl.

"You know," Dr. Sehl had said. "I sometimes discourage my patients from forming new, physically intimate relationships soon after a traumatic incident. In your case, however, with a relationship that's been established in every way but the physical for some time, and with your current capacity to deal with the mental ramifications –"

She'd cut him off. "You're telling me to have sex with Castle."

He'd flashed her a rare, brief smile. "I'm telling you to keep yourself open to new experiences."

_New experiences_, she told herself as she pushed open the door to Castle's bedroom. The shades were slatted open, so that just enough ambient light streamed through for her to make out his figure. As she paused beside his bed after snicking the door shut, she debated whether to flip on a lamp, but her hair was still blond and the shadows of abrasions were still on her wrists and ankles. (The darkness wouldn't help with the clunky wrist brace, with the raised ridges of the just-healed cuts on her back, but she was at peace, enough, with the scars.)

"Castle," she whispered, brushing a hand gently over his hair. She could just see his eyes blinking open slowly.

"Are you okay?" he asked, starting to sit up. She dropped her hand to his shoulder, pressed him back down, squeezed gently to release the coiled tension from his muscles.

"Yes," she said.

"Why," he began, but halted as she nudged him over, laying the length of herself against him in the bed, kissing him languorously. "What…" he started again, his voice already rough with arousal, as she wrapped her fingers around the hem of his shirt and tugged up. "There's no ru…" The air whooshed out of his body in a great rush as she skidded her hand down.

"No rush," she agreed, sliding her lips over his again.

Later, as he lay next to her, breathing deeply in sleep, she felt the echoes of his skin on hers: The muscles of his thighs contracting against her arched calves. The tendons of his neck tensing against her damp forehead. His hipbone bumping rhythmically against hers. His torso skidding up and down, up and down, over her stomach.

She felt a wave of questions and worry rolling slowly toward her, but a soft sleep was already washing through her consciousness. She reached out and lay her palm on his side, anchored herself in his presence, before she drifted away. 

* * *

X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X- X-X-X-X-X

Chapter 19 (which is the longest chapter or one-shot that my slightly-less-defunct muse has ever managed to get me to expel) is brought to you by this jug of Jose Cuervo Golden Margarita Cocktail and the sand and the ocean, by my kickass betas, and by all of my amazing, encouraging, sunhat-wearing, Christmas-song singing (Are we still doing that? Do we need to modify the song choice in light of the season? I feel like we updated outfits but not musical selections, but, I don't know, I can part with Santa hats more easily than I can part with an ominous rendition of _Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer _with only the sound of an angry axe being sharpened as background music) elf reviews.


	20. Chapter 20

The call clearing her for active duty came from Montgomery, at four in the afternoon, one month after Lanie called her about a body on her day off.

She'd gotten the green light from her physician the week before and from Dr. Sehl earlier that morning. By noon, Castle had noticed her glancing at her phone with increasing frequency. By two, she'd ironed a button-down and slacks each three times. By three, she'd begun sending interrogative texts to Ryan and Esposito. He'd tried to start conversations with her at least a dozen times, but her preoccupied, monosyllabic answers finally had him so discouraged that he retreated to his office for some quality time alone with Nikki Heat. He wasn't sure who was the more relieved when Montgomery finally called with the last, most important clearance.

It was another step, he thought, in her collection of the pieces of her life. The day before, she'd finally signed a lease on a new apartment, a bright, spacious studio in a secure building in Alphabet City. He hadn't thought she'd been planning on moving from her sublet, not until she'd mentioned it to his daughter, several days before.

_He awoke with his heart hammering against his ribs. He wasn't sure why until he caught the fragile edge of the dream, the dream he always had: bolting down the dark stairs to the basement, alone, this time, hurtling blindly towards a closed door. He'd woken up before he saw her body, lying peacefully next to a green and white rope._

_He never woke before he saw her body._

_He shifted, and there was Beckett, watching him muzzily, early-morning sunlight streaked across her cheeks, her calf pressed against his, her arm curled atop his chest. The remnants of suffocating panic sheared away at the press of her body, warm and boneless with sleep, against him._

"_You had a nightmare," she murmured, running her hand over his bare chest. He shivered._

"_It's better," he said, "it's better when you're here."_

"_I bet." She smiled, leaned over so that her blonde hair (he was almost used to seeing it, almost didn't double-take every time he looked at her) brushed against his cheeks, and then her lips were lazily sliding over his, and the dream was gone, his world constricting to the soft skin of her fingers, running up his neck, the smooth heat of her mouth, opening against his._

_And then there was the sharp sound of knocking at his door, and she was abruptly jerking away to the edge of the bed. "Sorry, Dad, I know it's early, but I'm meeting Ash little earlier to go skating so the lines won't be awful, and I wanted to make sure we had a chance to make the waffles you keep talking about so I thought maybe –" She'd been talking as she opened the door, but the second her eyes focused on the bed, on Kate, she stopped suddenly._

_He hadn't intended to keep secrets from his daughter, not exactly, but this was only the second night Beckett had spent in his room, and with all the chaos that had happened, he'd wanted to give it a little time, to let it settle, before he started hearing the inevitable questions about relationships that he would be incapable of fielding (if it were up to him, Beckett would have a ring on her finger already, but he had a feeling she wouldn't take to kindly to that)._

"_Ohmygod I'm sorry," Alexis said, looking hugely mortified, stumbling backwards out the open door._

"_No, wait," Beckett said, tilting forward. "Alexis, it's okay, it's not your fault."_

_Alexis took two small, hesitant steps forward, and the embarrassment on her face slowly faded into a smile._

"_Well, Alexis," he said absurdly, "I think it's time you know that Bec – Kate and I have, um –"_

"_I think it's great!" she blurted. "Are you – does this mean you're staying for a while longer?"_

"_Oh," Beckett said, and he could see her holding back the reflexive _'hell, no' _that she would have given to him. "No. When a – " she swallowed convulsively – "relationship is still so new, it's just a lot better if…" She trailed off, but Alexis remained watching her impassively from the doorway, and this was one jam Castle refused to help her out of. "I'm going to look for a new place, though, and maybe it'll wind up being a little closer," she said, almost as an afterthought, almost as if those words wouldn't diffuse another knot of tension that had lodged somewhere deep beneath his ribcage._

_Alexis' grin spread. "Gram and I were just talking about this!"_

"_Sorry?" Beckett asked, blinking._

"_She has a friend who has a studio not far from here that needs to get rented out, and she was telling me how wonderful it would be for you and really, it sounds like it's absolutely gorgeous." She paused. Beckett gaped at her. "I'll go get Gram right now and then you two can come help me make waffles and we can look at the pictures." She paused, considering them. "Unless…"_

_Beckett flushed. "We'll be downstairs in five."_

_Alexis departed swiftly, shutting the door behind her, and Beckett leaned over, prodding Castle in the center of his sternum with her good hand._

"_Hey! Ouch! How is your index finger so strong?"_

"_You put her up to this," Beckett growled, her eyes flashing._

"_You know, Alexis and Martha don't need my help to worry about you." _

_She glanced down, exhaled for a beat too long. "Well," she said, capitulation and a hint of affection scrawled across her face. "It won't hurt to go see it."_

Martha had dragged them to the beautiful, shockingly affordable studio that afternoon. Beckett had been openly skeptical of the sudden availability and the too-good-to-be-true price, but Martha had only smiled and said something airy about actors and connections and fate when Beckett questioned her, and while Beckett was a master interrogator, there was only so far she would push Martha.

He was vaguely unsettled about the impending move – the new studio was safe, gorgeous, and perfect for her, but their relationship had only existed within the narrow confines of his apartment, and it was too easy for his over-active writer's imagination to construct a scenario in which she drifted slowly away from him. The unease caused him to roam the house searching for her, until he walked through her half-open bathroom door and found her, sitting hunched over on a closed toilet seat.

"Sorry," he said. "Didn't mean to… are you okay?" At second glance, he could see a box clutched in her right hand. A wave of understanding washed over him. Three days ago, he'd spent too long staring at colors of hair dye in CVS before he'd finally settled on Chocolate Copper. She hadn't mentioned dying it since the failed attempt that Alexis had told him about, and the one time he'd alluded to bringing a stylist over, she'd shut him down so quickly that he'd decided to leave well enough alone. He'd put the box of dye on the top shelf of the medicine cabinet of Beckett's bathroom, a little too high to be convenient, and didn't mention it.

"I was thinking it was time," she said, staring down at the box. She clenched and unclenched the fingers of her right hand as she spoke. She'd been allowed to start taking her brace off for short periods of inactivity, but her motions were sometimes still stiff and pained.

"I think that's a good idea." He tried to keep his tone even.

She must have heard something in his voice she didn't like: she raised her eyes abruptly from the dye to look at him. "I'm not going to leave you, you know," she said bluntly, catching him so off-guard that he sucked in a mouthful of air too hard and wound up quietly choking.

"What?" he asked, after he finally regained control of his breath.

"Because I'm moving. Because I'm going back to work."

He felt their gazes locking as an almost-physical force. His heart stuttered painfully against his sternum – he'd always thought, back when they'd had nothing except long, intense moments of staring at one another, that his palpitations would be less severe after they'd finally slept together, but, if anything, sex with Beckett had intensified every glance, every touch.

Her eyes were turning too solemn, the clench of her jaw a little too serious. "What about when you start rocking your sexy brunette look again?"

Her lips quirked up. "Well. Maybe then."

"Let me – " he started, paused, rephrased, "Can I help?"

He watched her hold air in her lungs for half a second too long. "I don't…" she trailed off.

He took a gamble, pressed past the clench in his chest. "I left my nylon rope downstairs."

She huffed a soft laugh. "In that case." She tore open the box of dye, flexed the fingers of her right hand again.

He gently pulled the dye from her hands, saying, "I can probably figure it out." The overlarge paper of directions in tiny print indicated that maybe he couldn't. "We need to do an allergy test. And a strand test. It says I need to get scissors. And tape. And a plastic bowl and a clock."

She snatched the directions from him, stabbed with her index finger at the part that read _Color Application_. "Start here."

"But it says that to help minimize risk it's important to perform the skin allergy test forty-eight hours…" He paused at her glare, the one that informed him she was between three and five seconds away from kicking him out or inflicting some kind of bodily harm. "You know what, that's probably not that important. How about we start at _Color Application._"

"Good instinct."

Through some outstanding fortune, the box of Chocolate Copper required nothing more from him than to snap on gloves and twist off the cap. He started to ask her if she was comfortable on the toilet, if she wanted him to get a chair or to move somewhere else or if maybe he could call a stylist, preferably a petite female stylist who could keep up a constant, cheery chatter, but he swallowed his questions – he was certain that she wanted, more than anything, for it all just to be over.

He moved the tip of the bottle along her scalp, then carefully, gently, worked his plastic-covered fingers through her hair. He felt her tense, the ridges of her shoulders drawing up and in to him. "You okay?" he asked.

"Just great," she said, her voice half a note too low, her words too hoarse.

He massaged his fingers around to the front of her scalp and stepped into her, moving his thighs and stomach into the rigid line of her back, even though it made his arms tilt at an awkward angle, even though he could feel some of her dye-soaked strands of hair fall back against his chest. He kept his fingers moving smoothly through her hair, careful not to tangle or pull. "Be done soon," he murmured.

"This has got to be ruining your shirt." She moved away halfheartedly.

"You can make up for it later."

"Really, Castle?"

"It's hard to help myself," he said, looping strands around his fingers, working his way out to the tips of her hair. She didn't respond, but a hint of the tension drained out of her muscles, her back becoming a little less inflexible against him. He busied himself in the feel of the thin gloves shifting against the pads of his fingers as they moved along her head, in the acrid, cleansing scent of the dye, in the slow spread of deep brown through her hair. Even after his fingers had worked through every inch of her curls, he went back over her scalp once, twice (he never wanted to look at her and see a trace of blond again).

On his third pass, she finally shifted. "You've got to be done," she murmured.

"Okay, yeah," he said, stripping off the gloves and setting the timer on his watch for twenty minutes. "I think I may have found a new career. It's oddly soothing."

She glanced at her knees. "For some, maybe."

He mentally kicked himself. "Only twenty minutes and a thorough rinse and then we're done," he said inanely. They wouldn't be done after the twenty minutes it took the dye to set, or after she had rinsed it, or after the deep bruising finally faded away and her wrist stopped aching, or after the only physical marks left on her were the white, faint ridges of a couple scars on her back. God only knew, he'd be carrying it forever (the clench in his stomach, the horrifying panic beating around his chest during her abduction, was inscribed onto him, would be a part of him for the rest of his life).

He saw her shudder, a ripple of tension racing along her muscles, and he dropped to a squat in front of her, lightly grabbing her hands in his, drawing her wrist to his mouth and pressing his lips to the pulse-point there. The blood was thudding through her radial artery too fast. "Castle," she sighed.

"It's okay. I'm here." He didn't want to know the particular memories flashing through her mind that made her pulse pound so rapidly.

She shifted, clearly uncomfortable with his sudden, focused attention. "Don't you have something else you want to be doing?"

He titled forward, pressed his lips chastely against hers, cool and dry, her breath puffing in short bursts over his mouth. "No," he said, out of words, out of thoughts, out of everything but the sheer sense of comfort from the heat of her body so close to his and the thrumming need to make sure she felt that same comfort.

They waited silently: she, hunched forward on the toilet, he, squatting in front of her, his hands still loosely holding her hands, his knees and ankles starting to protest faintly and then fiercely, but he wouldn't move from this spot, wouldn't shift from his position crouched silently in front of her.

The chirrup of his watch startled them both; he tipped up and forward onto the balls of his feet; she lurched half off the toilet seat. Their foreheads connected with a dramatic crack.

"Christ, Castle, ouch," Beckett said, standing the rest of the way up. Castle had toppled back and was sitting splayed on the ground, rubbing his forehead, his legs twisted out in front of him awkwardly.

"Your head is so _hard_," he moaned.

"Come on," said Beckett, pulling off her dye-stained shirt and twisting on the spray of the shower. She reached down with her good arm and wrapped her hand around his wrist, pulling him up to his feet. "I'll make it worth your while if you help me get this dye out of my hair."

* * *

Beckett's phone trilled him awake. It was early. Somehow they'd twisted over each other in the night, so he was on her side of the bed and she was sprawled on his. A tendril of brown hair lay across his chest (hours ago, when they'd stumbled into bed, shedding clothing every step, he'd been unable to keep his hands off it – he'd never made love to her before with brown hair, and he felt some of his own gaping trauma quietly stitch together). The screen said it was Dispatch.

He reached for it, but she'd lurched awkwardly across his torso and grabbed the phone. "Beckett," she snapped into the receiver. His breath caught, and it took him a second to understand why – it had been too long since he'd heard her spit her name out with such purpose.

"Yeah… Okay…. No, I'm good. Be there in thirty."

She snapped the phone closed, stared down at it for a beat. He caught the slight slide of her teeth over her lower lip before she breathed deeply, ran a hand through her hair. He trailed a finger over her arm. The hesitation in her posture ebbed away, solidified into steel. Crackling with currents of purpose, her eyes locked with his. She tilted toward him. Her voice laced with determination and a dozen different wells of meaning, she asked him: "Are you ready?"

* * *

X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X

Well, my darling elflets, it's been a wild, crazy, multi-seasonal ride. I so want to say that there will be a sequel, but I say that after, like, 90% of the things I write because I always flail around pathetically, thinking, "O, woe to me, woe to the readers, woe to the _entire universe_, how can it possibly be over?" But 100% this was the hardest story to end, not necessarily because of the story itself (Muse and I are in SUCH a fight), but because I will miss my singing elf reviews so horribly and, I don't know, everything I hear from y'all just brings me _such _a smile.

So, so, so many thanks to my betas, to everyone who's read this, and, most importantly, to my pitchfork-carrying, Christmas-song-crooning, ever-so-encouraging singing elf reviews.


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